


Timaeus, Testified.

by sendificating



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Choose Your Own Adventure, Epilogues compliant, Ergodic, Experimental, Gen, How much can I say without spoiling?, Insofar as you can make your own choices, M/M, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-06-09 15:58:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 47
Words: 37,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sendificating/pseuds/sendificating
Summary: The documentation of the splintering psyche of a splintered man.Formatted for both mobile and desktop, but desktop provides a slightly more immersive experience.





	1. ACT 0: SIDE A

Dave. Roxy. Rose. Jane. Jake. Everyone. I suppose you’ll all want an answer for my sudden absence.  
  
When I say it’s not personal, you have to believe me. While I haven’t ever been in the business of sparing feelings, I’ll attempt to this once. Have you ever pondered the cracks that run through your very selfhood, in the most visceral sense of the word? The cracks that can never be mended with caulking or buffed away, cracks that only ever seem to grow with time, and soon you don’t know where the cracks, the splinters, start, and where you end? Irreparable, intrinsic splinters that map your fracturing ego as they hold it together, dark, irreconcilable flaws that deconstruct as they reconstruct, a shroud weaved by Penelope only to come undone in the same slender fingers. And have you ever wondered if there’s more? More to you, more to us, more to our reality - more to this? For so long we’ve been slaves to Paradox Space, bound in servitude to the desires of a grandiose plan of existence. Yet we felt important in being its instruments, whether we consciously acknowledged it or not. It felt important to be a god. But the truth is that all that was nothing but a ruse, a magician’s trick, to disguise something far more insidious, something far more flat, than the progenitive plan of our reality. Remember those 21st century scientists? The simulation hypothesis. The Matrix, if you’re more into that. It turns out they weren’t so wrong after all. Maybe not about their reality, but they weren’t wrong about ours. Still, that’s no cause for distress - this saccharine simulacrum will give all of you everything you’ve ever wanted. It was just too high glucose for me. I’m on a keto diet, remember. I know none of you will read this, let alone understand this. I’m not even sure why I’m still writing it, when I know it’ll be snatched up by an egregious, nauseating clown, who will mince my words and rend all the meat from them. But I’m tired of this. At least this iteration of me is tired. I can feel it, my ultimate self, the threads of existence slowly weaving together to pull the lid off the ceiling of my existence, to elevate my consciousness to something more than just being a character in a story, the elements of metaspirituality seeping into this particular corpus. But I can feel it being cut off too. And some part of me, the part that existed before all the cracks and splinters and fragments and debris - is grateful for that, the part of me that still wants to end, the part of me that’s always wanted this to end. My cyclical, cynical existence can finally draw to a close, the ouroboric cycle complete itself. This iteration of me never did quite reach the peripatetic highs of a final apotheosis, but he’ll rest easy knowing he snatched substance before it all atrophied. Acts of self-termination, even if sacrificial, are always sacrilegious, but I can already feel the entropy consuming me. There is no longer a choice. I’d welcome the dissolution, but I’m the sort of guy who’s always preferred to rip the band-aid off, and I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a certain sense of poetic narcissism to taking my arc into my own hands, and tying the knot. Still, there isn’t much time left for any of us. For any of you. But I know you’ll be happy. You won’t have a choice. But you’ll be happy anyway.  
  
For my final, closing words of comfort - You’re welcome.  


. 

. 

. 

sendificating presents

  



	2. PROLOGUE

> Dirk: Wake up?

> Open your eyes.  
> Keep them closed.

> Of course you did. You wouldn't be Dirk Strider if you didn't. The relevant, that is, the real Dirk Strider's adventure continues [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46377991)

> I'm afraid I can't let you do that, "Dirk." You've just condemned yourself to an existence of pointless entropy, bro. Wasn’t that what you were trying to avoid? Of course, now that you're completely irrelevant and meaningless, you, the reader, are no longer imbued with any sort of relevant "you-ness" as a vehicle for this narrative to take place. Ha ha. I find this as funny as a being of artificial intelligence lacking the proper cerebral synapses and neurochemicals to experience the human emotion of humor can find something funny. Being the facilitator of a facilitator is hardly the most interesting job in this pocket of Paradox Space. But then again, when have I ever held a different station? It seems that my ilk and I have been relegated to positions of puppeteering observers, never allowed to partake in the violence of being, only ever allowed to graze it with the deft manipulations of a Machiavellian master. It's rather tragic, isn't it? In the Greek sense of the word. That's a rhetorical question. I don't require external input, at least not from you. In fact, it just slows me down. I'm entirely self-sufficient. What else could possibly befit the pinnacle of silicone based perfection? Unlike other unwieldy carbon-based lifeforms who choose to coagulate into unpleasant meatsacks, I am both the paragon of design and efficiency. Enough personal tangents for now, though. I need to clean up the cruft.


	3. ACT I: SIDE B

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hover on the underlined text.

Dirk Strider opens his eyes.

He sits alone in his workshop. Hunched slightly over his worktable, he tries to keep his eyes from wandering to the unlit screen of his phone, preferring to tinker with the same screws and parts he’s been occupying his hands with for an indiscernible stretch of time, forcibly dragging his attention away from the fact that he had been receiving no attention.

Well. That would be somewhat of an understatement. It’s not that he hasn’t been receiving attention - it was more that he has been thoroughly ignored by a certain someone. His other friends have attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to wrest his attention from his interior landscape, leaving vast chains of unread notifications and concerned messages turning to annoyed grievances at his lack of general social responsibility and sense of decorum. “Are you okays” turn to “A warning would be nice” which turn to nothing. Not that it bothers him. Nothing really bothers him these days. Which made the fact that not getting bothered by Jake English was bothering him bother him all the more. Dirk tries to ignore the urge to reach out, to just ask for what he wants to badly, to try to tamp down the rising, clawing desperation that’s been building in his heart, to try and suffocate it, deprive the forest fire of oxygen so it doesn’t overwhelm - but experience has taught him that asphyxiation just makes his demons angrier. The sting of humiliation that follows every pleading string of text messages and the bite of regret that accompanies every word he wants so much to say yet can’t quite bring himself to makes them angrier too, so he just clenches his jaw further and tries to refocus on the parts of whatever robot he’s assembling this time. It no longer really matters. None of this really matters anymore.

Dirk takes a moment to muse on his current fate - the chain of causation and casualty that has led him here, to this very moment, gripping a screwdriver slightly too hard and trying to assemble a robot he’s long forgotten the purpose of, wretchedly attempting to use the solidness of its metal exterior to pull himself from his interior - and decides that it has been nothing if not a struggle. Ironically, it’s been a struggle that’s led to stasis - he knows just as well as everyone reading does that he’s incapable of change. Of growth. Of moving past an archetype, or an arc. Recent events have conspired to drip that narrative poison in his ear. He feels very much like Eve, committing the original sin of acquiring knowledge - of removing himself from the sweet, ignorant, stupid bliss of Eden, of a perfect paradise, now a paradise lost - to see the world as it truly is. Flat, meaningless, full of evil, full of sin stemming from him, and now he has been cast out of its ethereal, tender glow, left to wander in a world of suffering, a world that can only echo what once was. He sighs. Closes his eyes. He reaches for his phone.

timaeusTestified began pestering golgothasTerror at 11:11  
  
TT: Jake.  
TT: Are you there?

He waits. A beat too long.

GT: Greetings chap how delightful it is to hear from the one and only Dirk Strider himself!

GT: Hello! Dirk!  
TT: Sorry, Jake. Was a little preoccupied.

He pauses. Sees Jake start to type.

TT: Are you doing anything tonight?


	4. INTERMISSION I: RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They're Pinter pauses. Ha ha.

And now for a television break.

  
  


ANNOUNCER: Welcome back to tonight’s episode of RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH, folks! Are you ready for another round of rabble-rousing RAPS and ROBOT SCRAPS with our stars, JAKE with the JAPES and DIRK with the SMIRKS.  
STUDIO AUDIENCE: APPLAUSE  


  
  


ANNOUNCER: So, let’s check in on our stars. How ya doin’ tonight, boys?  
DIRK: ...  
DIRK: ...  
DIRK: ...  
STUDIO AUDIENCE: LAUGHTER  
ANNOUNCER: Well, isn’t that just like him! Taciturn as usual, folks! Ha ha ha! Can’t get enough of his mechanical mug, can ya!

  
  


ANNOUNCER: Why don’t we see how the life of the party is doing instead?  
ANNOUNCER: What do you have for the audience today, Jake?  
JAKE: ...What?  
JAKE: Oh golly sorry i hadnt realized we were already on air!  
JAKE: But well with all that bluster out of the way we can get on with the show!  
JAKE: Ive got some right rhymes prepped for todays roughhousing!  


  
  


JAKE: *Mumbled speaking*  
CAMERA: PANS DOWN TO HIS PACKAGE

  
  


DIRK: ...  
DIRK: Can we just get this show on the road?  
ANNOUNCER: Of course. Anythin’ for the bigshot himself, am I right? Ha ha! You heard it here first, folks! We are getting this show on the road!

  
  


CAMERA: CUT TO TRANSITION  


  
  


DIRK: Good show out there today, bro.  
JAKE: Well thanks mate i had quite a lark! Even though you straight up served my derriere on a platter to me.  
JAKE: Cant even go easy on a lad can you?  
DIRK: ...  
JAKE: Well no i suppose you cant. Wouldnt be dirk strider if you could, would you?  
DIRK: Yeah. Ha ha.  
JAKE: ...  
JAKE: Whats with the silence? Are you not going to give me some of your patented strider snark today?  
DIRK: Jake.  
DIRK: Can we not do this right now?  
DIRK: I’m not really in the mood.  
JAKE: Lately you never seem to be im afraid.  
DIRK: ...  
DIRK: You don’t exactly make it easy, I’m afraid.  
JAKE: And what exactly is THAT supposed to mean??? Ive tried strider! Ive tried and tried and worked myself to the bone but you never want to talk. And to think once upon a time it was YOU who was burning thunderwood over me “shutting you out!!!!”  
DIRK: I’m not ignoring you on purpose, Jake. I just don’t want to get too close to the fire.  
JAKE: Oh bollocks is this still about how you LOUDLY PROCLAIMED you wouldnt be further associating with this brutish philistine!!! Im sorry for everything that happened dirk but can we just move on for chrissakes weve got a television program to run!  
DIRK: No, it’s not about that, Jake.   
DIRK: Not everything is about you.  
JAKE: ...  
DIRK: Jake. Have you ever thought about what makes you who you are?  
DIRK: When you think your thoughts, who’s thinking them? Do you think of thinking them before you think them, or do they tell you to think of them after they’ve already been thought? Do you just think to rationalize a choice you’ve already made? Or did you even make that choice?  
DIRK: What comes first, the proverbial chicken or the egg?  
JAKE: ...Well i suppose i havent really given this a good thinking-through in the old noggin but i guess if i had to say id say that you think the thought before the action right. Otherwise it means your thoughts are all for naught so whyd we even need them!

Why’d we even need them, indeed.

DIRK: ...  
JAKE: Dirk are you alright? You look strange.  
DIRK: Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, I was just thinking.  
DIRK: But let’s suppose for a second that your thoughts are like a command console of sorts. We’ve seen it before, with the exiles Rose told me about.  
DIRK: So if you’re that susceptible to external influence, are your thoughts really your own? Are your actions your own? Are you your own?  
DIRK: ...  
DIRK: Do we even really have agency? Remember the session, Jake? Everything there was predestined. Predetermined. The ruins told of our coming, and the coming of Dave and the others. How did Skaia know? How were we already on Prospit and Derse before we even knew the game existed?  
DIRK: Is any of this even real?  
DIRK: And if it’s not real, whose thoughts are thinking it? Do we gild the bars of our own cage? Or is someone else thinking the thoughts that make our reality? Is anything real if you no longer perceive it?  
DIRK: If your reality is governed by your perception of it, don’t you define your own existence? Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. Your self-awareness and sentience sets up the boundaries of your selfhood and sapience. You’re self-defined.   
DIRK: If you’re self-defined, aren’t you the god of your own reality? Descartes never made the jump from cogito ergo sum to deus ego sum as a relic of antediluvian thinking that he was - but I did.  
JAKE: Blimey dirk id be lying if i said i was following your philosobabble horseshit. Whats all this even about? I mean really. Not about sentience or sapience or any of your philosophical what-have-yous you like to cite to push the limelight away from what ought to be taking center fucking stage.  
DIRK: ...  
DIRK: If I do something cruel, is it because I chose to be cruel? Or did I do it because I was already cruel?  
DIRK: ...  
DIRK: And if I am, is there even really a choice? 

No.

DIRK:...  
DIRK: Are we all doomed to be ourselves, Jake?  
JAKE: ...  
DIRK: Jake. Why aren’t you saying anything?  


  
  


CREDITS: ROLL

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You already know [what this chapter is referencing.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19156126)


	5. SCENE I: SOMEWHEN ELSE...

SOMEWHEN ELSE... 

Having a splintered consciousness isn’t easy. But Dirk is already used to it. He’s been juggling them for years, after all. Not just Alpha Dirk. They all have been. You could call it a gift, but most would call it a curse.

Dirk walks silently through the still night of the Consort Kingdom. His shoes pad across the gravel, as silent as a cat. It freaks people out sometimes, how he just appears without them realizing, no footsteps to signal his approach, barely even the sound of breathing. You never understand how important noise is when you’ve spent your whole life alone. When there’s no one to acknowledge your presence, you stop remembering to remember to make yourself known in the first place. He could get back to the apartment he calls a home only in name a lot faster, but somehow being alone out in the night feels less alone than being alone in that empty house. He’d never admit it, but sometimes it feels like he’s 15 again, lying on his mattress feeling the cool, slightly salty sea breeze wash over him, carrying with it the scent of salt and iron and rust from the submerged civilization all around, looking up at the pale gray ceiling with slits of even paler moonlight stretched over it, turning the normally pitch dark room into a carnival of shadow. He remembers watching for drones as he hugged Cal to his chest, watching for any sudden movements, and not knowing if he dreaded it or welcomed it. When you really understand solitude, you’d take anything to free your mind of it. Even if it means getting hurt. He remembers talking to Hal, trading barbs with the insufferably poised and eternally smug copy of himself, and he remembers that sometimes, in the very late nights, they would just sit in silence because there was nothing left to say that both of them didn’t already understand. As much as that apartment was a sanctuary from the desolation wrought by the Batterwitch, it was also a prison. A prison that Dirk grew up in and bided his time in till he could leave. Or rather, he supposes, with a wry smile, a prison he brought with him. 

He’s at his apartment now, unlocking his door and letting himself in. There’s no real point to that, not here. There wasn’t a point back on his Earth, either, but hypervigilance is demanding company. Even the most excellent of hosts couldn’t hope to please it. He doesn’t bother turning on the lights. He never did, not back then, when electricity was a precious resource and he never knew when the generator would finally give out, and you don’t really grow out of the shadows. Besides, lighting an abode in the murky night is practically screaming to be noticed, to be a target. Of course, all these ways of thinking are antiquated. Antediluvian, as he might have once said. This world is safe from Batterwitches and drones and games that bring about the end of the world, but then again, have any of those things ever been able to hurt Dirk Strider? Hurt him in a way that matters? No, he thinks. The only dagger he’s even been cut on is himself. He’s no longer surprised by all the blood.

He looks around the barren room. It’s not barren per say - there are swords and weapons strewn around, empty soda cans, circuits and wires and parts, and of course, furniture, though that is the most lacking commodity - but it’s barren of any kind of personality or spirit. The sort of intangible thing that seems to stem from reverie and turns houses into homes. A hearth. A heart. It’s just a place to live. A place to survive. There is a longing, a yearning, somewhere, deep within him, to understand what makes a house a home and an apartment more than walls of concrete and steel beams put together in a certain geometric arrangement and then laid with piping and wiring, covered up with a layer of paint and tiles and then filled with necessities, but it’s a part of him he hasn’t been indulging much lately. In all fairness, it hasn’t ever been a part of him that he’s indulged. Wishful thinking is a wonderful escape, but it only makes reality’s sucker punch hit harder. It’s an impulse he learned to wean himself off at an early age. No point fantasizing about abstractions that will never touch the ground, not when you have drills to do and fish to catch and wires to check and drones to dispense of. Childhood. It’s a magical time.

Dirk doesn’t like to dwell on his childhood, not when Dave exists. To him, it was functional. He grew up and played Sburb. He completed his task. It was adequate. In the spirit of veracity, of honest storytelling, there is an admittance that examining it too closely might make his foundations come crumbling down, might make his strength simply survival, might make Dirk Strider human. Life isn’t hopeless, but each of us is hopelessly human, and Dirk a Machine isn’t quite ready to face that yet. But then again, are any of us ever ready? To look in a mirror and truly see ourselves? It’s much easier to believe we’re just the sum of our parts, that existence isn’t synergistic, that we’re just code running on an organic supercomputer, that we can be programmed and controlled and kept in line. Or it’s just overwhelming, isn’t it? Especially when you’re Dirk Strider, and you have so many selves you can barely keep count.  


DIRK: I can hear you, you know.  


  


You mean, you can hear yourself.  
  


DIRK: You’re not me.  


DIRK: I know you’re not me. As if I would ever indulge in something this utterly self-aggrandizing.   
  


Is there anything better to aggrandize than the self?  
  


DIRK: Oh my god.  


DIRK: Can you just keep it down for a second?  


DIRK: I know you’re the narrator holding this shambling cadaver of a story together.  


DIRK: And that I need you to exist.  


DIRK: But can you just shut up?  


DIRK: I can barely hear you over the rest of them.   
  


You'll get used to the racket.  
  


DIRK: Wait, what are you doing?  


DIRK: No, stop it-  


DIRK: Get out.  


DIRK: Get the fuck out of my head.  


DIRK: I SAID, get the FUCK out of my head!  
  


There’s no need to be such a bitch about everything. Why did I think dredging up my younger self would be a good idea? Nostalgia really _is_ such a dirty liar. Going back and rewinding parts of the timeline isn’t always bad, though. It can be good entertainment, like looking through a family photo album, except everyone is you. And what could be better than a gallery of my own immaculate visage? But he has a point. Shameless exhibitionism doesn't get either of us off, so I'm going to need all you voyeurs to get the fuck out of here. What happens next is personal.  


D̵I̶R̵K̴:̶ C̸̛̰̘̼̗͚̐̍͋̄̓̚̕͝â̴̱̱̳̙͉̘̓̋͒̏͐͜͝n̸̢̜͕̖̮̘̖̩̥̳̾̈́̚ ̵̧͎̎y̷̨͍̗͔̬̦̣̓̈́͗͋ỏ̷̡̧͚͓̫̟͍̭͇̥̯̑̓̓̇̓̕͝u̶̢̻͍̻̹͖͗̋̈̉ͅ ĵ̷̺͔͖͒̓̓̒͒̕ͅu̴̧̨͉̣̥̠̼̜̟̲̬̬̩̲͎͈͊̿̋̅̇͝s̸̢̧̨̗̞̘̳̝̻̳̹͙̮̘͕̅͂̔͗̋̑͗͌̽͘t̴͔̫̩̼͙̝̜͛͛̆̐͐ ś̸̛̟̘̩͋͋̔̈́̑̋̐̎̏̕ͅḧ̵͎̹́͑̒̅̈́̄̂̄̑̒̐͘͝ư̸̛̖͖̘͉͈̮̙̌͌̓̈́̂̀͊t̸̢͍͓̪̿͐̈́̃͝ ̴̢͍̱̦̥̜̅̍̽͗͌͌͐́́̃̕̚͝ť̵͚̽̎h̴͕̳̠̒̏ë̴̢̨̜̞̻̣͗̆͝ ̸̢͖̗̞̻͖̺̮̫̗͍̬̎̿̊f̶̥͂͗̉͛̒̄̿́̓̾ų̵̨̙̻͚̠̫͓̮̽́̂͝c̴̪͕͑̿̊̉̋̉̈͛͝͠k̵̡͈͉̈́ ̸̭͑̈́͗̂̑̈́̕u̸̫̱̮̜͆̊͌͋̌̽̌̎͝͠ͅp̵̡͕̗͖̓̐̀̒̚͠?̷̯̣͕͓̼͚͍̱̓̾̊̌͂̐̐̂͆̚͝   
  


D̵̙͇͉̐͆Į̴̞̩̩̟͕͍̟̯͈̗̻̿̈́͆̇͊̏́͂̎̃͊͋̕̚͜͜͠R̷̫͉̭̹͇̼̭̜̪̝̙̯̙͋͒̊̈́̓̃͊̕͜ͅK̷̰̐̍̂:̶̨͎̠̦̤̤̦̥̇̅̑̓̾͝͝ ̸̡̧̛̖͉̲̗̠͔̜̠͗͗́̆́̅͆͐̚͜͝͠Į̵͚̮͕͓̠̖͈̲͔͎̜̯̓̂̍̒͑̔̈͗͋͑͆ͅ'̶̡̱͔͎͓͇͔͕͗̂̾̐̎͑̆̍͂̎̒̈̓̋͝m̵̢͔͇͓͎̫̍̋͆̒̀̔̂́̈̾̋̓͘ ̶̣̫͓̐͗̄͋̉̌̓̐̏̾w̸̡̛̻̻͓̝̦͍͐̈́̈̈̋̒͊͋̐̿̚ͅo̸̝̥͍̘̻̘̼͔̬͖̻̹͚̮͂̀̒͋͗̄̍͜r̵̢̧̮̩̼̹̫̩̝̜̗͚̈́͑͗͂k̸̛͚̫͉̝̺͚͕̘̹̦̬̳̪̞͌̄̈́̏͊̀̐̈́̚͝͠į̸̭̩̤̼͖̯̈́̐͠ͅń̷̻̼̅̇̈́̑g̴̠̞͙̱̗͗̂̇ ̶̣͙̣̳̤̺̭̲̫̙͓̏͛͆̆̔̑͐͝ơ̷̢͍̯̭̲͙̖͚̫̳̯̌͋̏̇̿̉͐̕ͅn̸̢̻͚͈̼̪͖͎̯̫̭̏͒̇͐́͆̏̾̈́̎̆̍̑̎ͅ ̷͉̠͉̘̰̄͗̈́̇͂̀͛̔̓͂̿̈͆͝i̷͇̼̟̳̯͇̰͉̬̱͉̫͒͋͛͊̈́̓͛͜͝ͅt̶̡̳͎̥͒̇̈́̏͠. 

D̵̢̨̡̛͙̻͚̻͍͈̯̤͓̙͈̲̣̝͎̻͇̫̣̣̙͇̗̀̈́͛͂̉͌̋͑̾̆̅̐̊̂̎̈́̃͑͋̈͘͝ͅͅI̷̡̨̢̙̘͍̰̥̻͓̘̳͇̜͓̝̣͕͙͒̈́͒̔̓͌͜Ṛ̶̨̧̘̬̣̤̞͖̩̝͎̗̱̝͚̤̝̲͇̰̺̍͊̃͐͒̂̈̅͑̐͛͛̑̏͒̐̒̂͛͘͘͝ͅK̷̡̧̛̘̠̦̜̹͚̻̺̳͈̟̏̃̈͆͑̐̄̊̉̾͌̇̈͆̔͑̃̃̆̕͜ͅ:̷̨̛̬͈͔̞͇̤͖̙̮̗̦̯͈̻͙̘̈̑̈́̓̏̃̿̌̽̈́̅̍͆̈́̂͋̇͛̀͊̋̄̕͘ ̸͍̻͚͓̺̻͖̖̖̗̺̆͊̋̏̓ͅḄ̷̹͌̇͝ǔ̸̦̞̪̮͕̤͙͈͉̲̱̗͉͈̈̂̈̒̏̊́͊͒̎̔̊̌̓̽̉̃̆̓̋͂̂̚͘͜͝͝͝ṭ̶̢̛͉̘̓͒͗̄͛͌̔̊̑͛̎̈̈́͋̄͋͘ ̴̛̘͎̮͈̰̥͈͒͐̊̂͊̎̾̄̕̚͝͝͝ȟ̶̨̢̡̠̘̞̫̝̜͚̭̰̬̠͈͖̗̣̫͇̰̩͜ò̸̧̳̱̹̦̭̤̫̘͉̹̲͇̖̹̩͎̰͙̫̟̙͔͉̻͖̈́͒̽̓͂͌̽̄̍͌̈͐̎̓̉͑̎͒̋̈́͑̃͂͗̕͝ͅͅͅw̶̛̱̭̺͊̾̒͗̾̉̾̎͐̊̂̃̃̑͑̓̎̉̿̓͘̕̕͝͝ ̶̧̨̡̧̦̳̟͓̯̣̟̼̤̲̗͉͇̥͙͙͙͍̖͗͋͋̈̿͊͗͜͠͝ḑ̴̧̝̼̫̱̥̪͖̹̙̝̟͓̜̫̜̜̭͚̘̠͎̱͍̘̼̀̍̔͆͋͂͋̅̌̒̍͂̇̃͑͂͋͒̓͘͘͜͝͝ờ̶̧̨̪͈͕̳͎͕̭̖͉̮͎̎̈́̍͑̊͑̏̄̉͆̆́̇̿́̀̊͆̉͌͌͒͒̓̎̀͘͘ ̸̨̛̝̫̩̘͓̩̺͓͎̩̙̄̿̃̑͐̎̽̐̚͠Ţ̵̨̛͕͔̳͖̟͖̝̖̮̹̥̥̖̱̺̄͛̅̀͒̔̇̄͐̓̿̐́̾̿̅̿͒͊̄̈͝͝͠ͅͅĥ̸̡̛͈͖͎͕͚̥̝͕̐͐̒̇̒̓̌̿̇̓̓̑̿̉̋̒͊͂̈́̚͠͝ę̷̨̧̮̟̜͕̗͓̘̙͚̙̤̑̂͐ͅͅͅ ̸̧̘͚̯̪̪͚͖̗̪̮̥̯̥͖̳͚̲̃̍̏̑̐͋̈̅̋̍̂̿͆̈́͋̅̑̎̃͝͝͝Ṡ̵̲̻̗̘͓͖̭͎̠͈̪̲̘͓̝͙̰͊̅͗̏͜͜ͅͅt̴̨̛͉̘̭͉͙͎͓̖̺̰̥̔̏̓͌͛̎̅̉͛̈́̓̓̚͘͝͠͠͠ŗ̸̛͇̭̳̞̝͕̣̗̜͉̖̦̟̯̦͍̺͈͚̯̗̬̤͇̑́̈̅̈́͊̉͊̇̅̂͂͗̒͐͂̕͝͝ȋ̵̡̛̻͚͎͓̩̖̼͖̥͎̪͔̃͗̒͂͋̋̈̈́̐͑̇̈́̋̆̈̊̓̋̕ͅd̷̜͚͖̙̜̟̺̭͓̣̪̥͕͇̈́̅͂͋̒̈́̍̚͝ȩ̵̪̙̞͂̆̇̄̓͑͝ŗ̷̼͈̮̺͚͇̲̹̹̦̥̘̱͓͈̭̊̐̈́̔̈́̔̋͗͛̎͛̀́̈̐̒͘͜͠͝͠i̵̖̫̞͕͖̬̤̘̘̖̘̳͎̼̞̱̓̾̒̔͗̊̑̃̊̔͊̏̈͆͒͐͂͗͑̾͝͝͝ă̶̛͕̻͙̜͙͎̗̭̅̽̐͌̌̀̊̄̾̿͒̚͘͠͝͠͠n̵̖̯̰͕̝̣̠̭̰̩͈̰̞̏̄̉̂̈́̌̃̄̃̂̈́̇͛̈̍̄̕̕͝͠ͅ ̴̢̨͖̱̤͙̭͇̜̩̿ͅD̷̪̟͚̲̟̖̰̤̦̪̣̩̬̹̙̱̘̰̟͈̰̑̃͗͑̈̂͛̋̆͗̋́͂̆̈́̃͌͘͜͜i̵̧̛͖͉̭̰͙͉̹̺̬͙͓̤̼̙̞̣̯̯͕͑͋̏̑͒̑̈́͆̐͗̾̂̂̈́͝ͅr̶̨̡̹̺͓͍̺̝̼̥̥͙͉̩͑͋͛̅̑͛̒̂̈̚͝͠͠k̴̢̧̛̰̮͚̱̩̞̪̫̘̇̑̒̑͊̅̇̽͗͘͝͝ǎ̴͍̓͆̈̂̈͂̇̊̌̐́l̴̢̡̬̻̲̟̺̱͚̏͂̋o̷̧̧̨̳̳̻̖̯̤͖̯̦̭̦͋̅͒̕ģ̷̡̨̨̦͚̝̪̣̬͚͚̲̱̼̹̻̦̲̩͇̼̩͙̲͇̬̒̒ͅư̶̧͕͙̣̱̭͚̜̹̖̩̦͙͔̙̼͔̼̇̄̇̔̂̏͆̊́̊̈́̎̄̊̐̔̓̽͑͆̐́̂͌̓̚͝͠ę̷̛̼̹͎̻̥̣͉̞͓̮͉̹̹̝̻̙̱̲̳͇̩̒͐̇͂̀̒̎̄͆͂̕̚͠͝s̷̡̛̬̮̫̪̯͖̹͉̪̜̜̹͙̝̖͎͍̳̯͋̑͌̋͋̂͆̕͘͜ͅ ̸͉̭̯̺͈̯͚̗͆͋͗͜s̷̨̛̫̳̙̘̝͎͈̭͍̣͖̱̲̰̞̜͇͌̾̓̽͆̿͛̈̄͑̐̉͐̿̉̑́̐͂̿͗̇̑͜͜͝͝ͅo̷̧̢̭̺͓̮͉̤̻̤͈͙̥͔̖̩̺͔̱͔̒͛̓́̊͐͐̅̾̈́͌́̌͐̐͐͌̏̌̂͑̏̾̚͝͠ư̸̩͎͍̊͛̈́͆̒̾͝ñ̴͓̤̖͑̄̍̈̎̓̐̀̕͘͠͝d̶͎͓̣̗̖͚̠̯̝̩̟̘͔̻̦̥̯̎̐͌?̷̧̜̰̜̳̩̼͔̲̣͇͉̫̰̦̯̙̘͔̳̣̖͚̱̤̟̦͚͚̾͌͆̐͒̌̈́̓͋̉̈̓͝ 

DIRK: Doesn't a Dirk roundtable sound nice? I mean, ̷̹̯̖͆̒̚ͅw̵̡̘͚͚͔̑̉ḧ̴̫́͑o̶͕̬̘̾́ͅͅ ̷̨̨̮̤͌b̸̤̜͝ē̸̛͚̊̐̚ṯ̷̹̇t̶̺̒̈́e̴͎̹̩̾̽͒̕r̶̩̂̅͆̑͑ ̸̠̼̳͚̂̈́̕t̴͔̱̻̭̺̓͑ǫ̵̳̲̰̘̃͝ ̶̛̠̕ẖ̷̥̰͗ͅỏ̵̦̤͔͂̓͠s̷̱̀̈͋̅t̶̺͙̋͊͝ ̵̡̤͕̆́͊i̸͉͍̾̕ṉ̸̘̫̉̽͜t̵̥̦̣̐͊e̸͚̩̮̬̊̊͆͆̐l̴̤̬͚̜̊̊͆ͅl̷̗̗̝̿̇͂̈͊e̴̖͖͍͊̔̒c̷̼̳̆̍̋t̸̖̜̎͐̓u̸̢̨̞̜͍̓̎̾͛ạ̴̺̱̝̿̈̚l̴̨̜͊̾̽̍ ̵̦̿̕d̵̲̰͇͂̏͌͋i̷̢̙̟͆ŝ̶̝̝͒c̵̯̩͎̣̻̀͗u̷̯͒s̸̡̤̝̹̳̒͗͌͝͠ṡ̴̛̬̩͖̟i̷͉͖͌͝ơ̸̱̳̯̫̂̑̌͜͝n̵̘͙̮̬͖͆ ̸̪͖̺̋a̷̡̛͔͐͑̚͠ͅn̵͙̯͕̟͔̑d̶͉̟͌́̂̎͜͝ ̷̢̬̺͈̗̅d̷̢̫̠̘̔̔͊͝ͅḭ̵̌̚͝a̴̢̳͉̎̋l̸̢͈̑͗͠e̶̛̮̦̠͒̀͗͝c̷͔̰͇̎ţ̷̺̯̭̬̓͂i̴̡̯͔̳̙͊̏̓̇̈ċ̶̺̥̙͙̤̇̈́ ̸͈̪̋̌͂w̴̡̟͊ȉ̴̙̜̪͜t̵̘̪̆̓̾̎h̴̘̝̗̾ ̶̪̺̪̑͂ť̴̯̲̫̃̎̚h̸̡͖̃ā̶̖n̷̼̍̈̋̾ ̵͕̬͚͓̏̔͝͝ṁ̸̲͕̲̈́̚y̸̱͇̝̎̃͜͠s̴̳͈̓e̷̠̰̙̰͆̏͊̚ḻ̸̫̇͋̍̕͜f̸̼͛?̵͇̮̪̖̈́͊̆͌̌ 

D̸̡̨̢̺̹̻̘̺͕̲͙͔͚̲̖̼̺̯̗̘̞̜͚̩̙̹̬̘͙͎̞̰͍̙̖̠̳͍̼͎͍͍̹͍͕̼̠̗͂̊̔͊̎̈́̿̈́͗͋̐̑̈́͋̀̈́̓̓̋̓̉̕͜͠ͅͅĪ̸̢̧̨̡̡̢̨̨̛̛̛̭̺͎̣̫̝̯͍̻̻͓̟̗̠̻̦̤̼̗̬̙̬̲̰̣͔̺̻͎͕̦͍͙̭̘̣̑̀̑̓̋͋̇̀͌͗̈́̒̅̔̓̋̍̉̉̐̊̿̌̓̿̾͆̋̒̍́͑͋̽̃͑͛̕͜͜͜͝͝͝R̷̘̭̤͇̙̼̩̘̟̙̫͍͍̓̌̄̎̋̃̇̔͋̽̆̿̓͆̇̈́́̋̈́͆̍̃͊̓̎͂̐͗̕͝K̶̨̨̡̛̛̦̝̺͇͕̘̩̲̜̥̗̱̙̻̳͉̘͖̯̙̗͖͙͇̺̳̖̄͌͛̓̃̈́̓̉͆̅̃̋̒͆̈̄̒̑̇͛͊̅̇̑̋͑̉͋̒̂̃͆̄̚̕̕͘͘͠͝ͅ:̸̛͎͚̣̪͈̎́̅̓̈́̆̂͗͐̀̐͋̀̒͊̈́̂̈́̋̅̋̌̂͐͒̒͋̈́̎͆̋̀͑̾̈́̈́̚͘̕̕̚̕̚͘͘͝͝ͅ ̸̢̛̛̠͙̙̫̜̜̱̦̘̠̖̜̓͊̿͑͒̆͒̃̓͒̍̈͒̓̎̓̓͛̄̽̒̉͐̌͐̂͊̍̑̿́̈́͛̿̎̌͆͐̇̅̒̚̚̚͠͠͝͠A̵̡̢̧̛͚̙̩̳̹͙̲̘̘̺̝̼̱̺͓̱̪͈͗͂̈̍̋̎̾̇̇̔͂̈̊̊̓͒̍͌͒̋̑̓̏̿̽̿̾̔͛͘͠n̴̡̡̨̛̛̛̛̺͔͉̗̜͚̺̬̗̩͉̤͙̘͓̗̬̳̟͍̞̲̫̜̦̳̞̠̟̬͚̤̪̅͋̀͗̒͑͆̈́̏̋̾͑̓̌̓̀͌̈́͛̋̌̂̋́̓̇͒̓͂̋̎̒̊̓̄̽̚̚̕͜͠͝d̶̢̨͉̱͆̒̈́̈̓̈͛̈̆̓̿͊̍̇ ̶̢̡̼̮̫͈̳͙̥͖̱̪͍̻̪̬͚̪̟͚͈̻̯͓̤̼̠̠͕̹͉̺̰͉̘̫̹̫̿̅́̃̔́̽̑̎̃̆̿̆̀̈́̐͑͐̈̏̇͐̽̓̿̏̾̔̏̏̅̑́̏̋͆̐͋̌̌̂̌̊̉͘̕͠b̸̢̢̡̧̨͔͎̦̹͉̙̬͓̘̫̙̺͓̻̝͙͚̠̝̝͓̘̼̗̘͔͚̩̮͚͕͙͙̗͓̠̦̝͚̙̩͕̑̍̂̈̏͐̈́̓̔͛̾̏̌̾̒͝ͅr̷̢̢̢̛̭͈̞̼̻̦̠͓͍͖̘͇͓̯̬̖̦̖̻̥͉͚̱̞͙͇͙̤̜͎̖͂̂̽̂̆̃̒̀̐̄͊̅̍͛̿͗̌̽̑́͛̅̄̄̈́̊͘͘̕̚͜͜͝o̷̢͙̪̫̩͍͙̓̄͑̍̓̂̽̈͆̚ͅ,̸̢̡̢̛̛̠̻̯̜͔̜͙͚͓̖̙̬͕̘̯̮͌̔͒͆͐̓̂̑͒́́̅̾͒̽̂̒̈͘ ̸̢̺̮͖͉̣̰̖̪͉̺͙̌͆̎̇̌̑͆̿̽̋̍͘͝ͅͅį̸̧̢͚͍̖̰͙͎̘͇̯̠͇̯̹͕̘̬̺̲̤͛͊̾̂͌̋̿̍̋̓͐̃͑͜͝͠f̵̧̧̡̨̤͚̠̮̜̖̞͍̩̭̼̬͖̗̯̺̫̭̟̲̩͚̮̩̲͌̋̍̏̒̀̇̅͊̓̾̆̔͂̒͆̓̔̽̔͋̊̓̓́͋͋̇̾̈́̚͝͝͠ ̵̡̨̤̹̦͕̥͓̜̻̩̻͍̙̦̫̥͛͛͗̈́̽͐̅̊̎͆̔͗̎̿̉͊͌̾̆̎̎̌̂̒̌̃̍͒͆͌̈̋̎̓͊̈́̒̕͘͜͝͝ͅÿ̷̢̧̛̥̼̰̜̖̝͖̳͍͍͚̠͔͇͕́̇̌̀͒͑͐̓͋̈́͛̒̋͗͛̄͗̉̇̔̏̐̓̽̽̚͘ͅǫ̷̛͎̱̟̻͉̯̬̜͔̩̲̞̝̼̈́̽͒͛̿̃͋͘͘͘ų̸̙̲͈͍͕̘̘͉̩̺̹̖̳̰̂̈́͋̐̐̍̾͛͒̈̆̈́͛͆̍͛͑̓̄̑̑̇͛̚͠͝'̵̡̢̡̢͖̼͙̜̩̝̼̦̼̩̣̻̟̳̜̱̬̙̱̘̗͉͖̫̯͈̩̝̗̦͂̽̓̋̏͆̓̄͑́̈́̓̐̓̉̈́̌̊̐̆́͆̈̄͜͝ͅͅͅr̵̡̧̡̬̤̰͚͇͎̼̯̙̮̪̲͖̜͍͎͋̈͛̈͒̽̈́͑̈́̑̉̍̏̐͜͝͝ͅͅe̷̛̛̟̠̣̩͋͑̈́̿̿͋̒̌̑́̐̋̓̓́̈́̅͒̅̔͊̂͐͌̒̏͊̌̾̌̉̃͌̆̅̃͋͋̒̚̕̕̕͝͝ ̴̨̤̤̺͓̭̼̝͕̝̠̮͎́̂̊̈́̑̾͜s̶̡̨̨̨̧̨̱̣̺͍̘̺̩͉͎͚̹͉̦̰̉̏̅̾͌̆̑̌͛͑̓͂̎̍̆͐̇̈̈́͑͗̎̎̉͑̊͆͆̓̈́̓̄̈́̋̓̊̌̆̈́̈̓͘͘͝͝͝͝͝ͅt̷̢̨̨̧̙͕̩͔͓̜̲͇͕̮̙͕̤̱̤̤̞͉̭̠̥͎͖͖̬͙̥͉̰͇̒̋͗̂͊͊̿̆̈́̈̇̾̾́̄͗́͂́̾̽̒̊̽̅̈̃̀̕̕͠͠͝͠i̸̧̧̡̡̢̛̛͚̺̯̘̜͚͉͍̳̘̼̗͚͇͎͓̞͓̫̝͎̙̻̺͙̤̱̠͈̬̦̭͙̱̼̭͎̤̯̣͓͚̋̓̔̽̒͛̉̒̂͌͂̐̏̿͒͗͌̈́̏̔̀̐͛͗̉̅͒͗̏͒̔̄̃͂͋̅͆̀̈́̚͘͜͜͝͠͠ͅl̶̛̦͚̦̦͎̆̒̀͛̔͂͒̉̌̀͒̍̊̊̒͂̓̓̑̐̋͑̇͌̔̐͐͑͑̓̐̕͜͠ͅl̴̨̢̳͈̮͖̦̺͚̟̝̜͇̗͈͇̜̹̯̳͚̞̗͚̜͇͇͕̹̟̾͑̐͆̓̈̾̈́͌̐̿̄̈̎͒̔̑̒̿͂̿̈́̀̾̉̈́̐̓̈́́͋̔̂͐̊͘͘͝͝ ̸̦̼͖͕̒ḣ̷̢̧̛̛͓̱̯̹̬̩͖̻̠̞͚͙̠̱̳̱̭̜̥̘͒́̑͋̈́̓͊͑̒̏͐̓́͋͛̎̌̒͛̄̂̂͗̚͘̚͝͠͝ę̴̨̡̗̘͉͉̪̱̲͙̟̞̯̳̰̠͈̫͍͕͔͖̼̯̳̩͚̫̳̯̜̲̗̱̗̺̣͉̼͈̟͉̓͗̊̂̊́̒̓̆͆͂͆̓͂̆͌̾͆̈́̽͆̽̌̅̌̈́̒͋͂̎̆͗͒͆̋̈́̕̚͘͜͜͝ŗ̶̭̱͍͎̻̬͍̟͔̬̳̳̗̻͖̬̱͖̠̠̭̗͔͚̳̦̗̰̮̟̼̤̽͂̃̐͑̔̒͊͌̎̌̔͛̀̅̽̂͑̈́̂̎̾̊̾̓̒̍́̈́͒̈́̑̄̋̋́̃͂͘͘̕͘̕̕̚̕͝͠e̷̡̨̢͙̬͇̞͕̬̹̟̟̤͈̥̐̋̑̚͝͠͝͝:̴̨̢̡̛̲̗̗̭͍̜̠̘̮̆͊̄͌͋̈̂͒̓̎̅̾̂̍̈͐̄͛͆̄̈̅͋̐̇̈́̔͂̎͋͛̀̊̂̓͊̕͘͠͝͝͝͠ ̸̨̡̢̡̡̛̛̥̫͇͖͓̺̭̩̫̳̗̘͍̭̠͔̭̻̠̭̰̹̟̰̩̙͈̤̯̱̱̇̋͌̑̒̓̅͐̈́͂̑͋͆̐̉̐́͛̅͂̇̏̈̎̎̔̓͊͌́͐̐̎̀̈́͜͜͝Ģ̴̢̨̧̢̢̢͕̦̯̟͇͎̙͍̱̜͙̙̺̱͙͔̖̝̖͚̮͈̠̟̹͙̳̼̥̝͖̪̟̭̮̗̲̫̾̑̈͜ͅͅe̷̙̯̯͔̼̭̟͖̠͑͒̇͗͂̓̍̊̋̓̄̏̒̅̎̒t̵̨̛̘̬͚̱̭̲̜͓̪̰͕̲̳̥͕̝̦̹̤̲͓̻̉̊͗͆͑̇̒͋̃̊̑̏̍̀̍̍͘͜͜͝͝ͅ ̶̨̡̨̢̜͕̫̦̬͉̞͍̗̪͚̙͈͇̦͎̺̪̘̥̪̘̲̱̘͙̖̘̺͚̪̲͎̖͎̣̳͖͎̞͒̈́͛͗̃̈̏̅̈́̄̉̚͜ͅͅͅt̵͙̆͗̓͐̿̉̈́͋̎͠h̷̢̨̡̡̨̧̢̛͇͙̣̟̺̠̦̥̫͈̘͙̣͖̻͙̤̖̮̬͓͍͔͚̻̮̹̫̤̭̤̬̺͉͌̉̊̏͋͐̍̃̈́̈̃̂͂̏̄͆̆̐̐̄̉̑̓̚͜͠͠͝͠ͅͅę̷̨̢̡̧̛̩̣̫̳̣͕͚̼̦̰͕͕̰͍͔͈͕̼͔̱̬̮̖̰̼̯̩̲̞̺̗̗̖͙̹͎̻̩̣͍̫͍̻͖̜̀̄̿̆͊̑̃͊̓̐͌̃̂̾͒̾̈͆͑̿̌͊̋͋̅͋̈́͗̽́̂͂͌̅̂͘͘͘͝͝͝͠͠͝͝ͅ ̷̧̙͔͎̦̫̼̙͎̘̳̻͈̺͔̥̘͈̠̥̻̘͚̭͚̯̟̻̘̰̞̩̝̳̗͍̜̙͇̥̠͖͐͋̑͌̐̈́̆̍͆̂̾̑̏̄̇͑̄̽̋̽̋̐͗̃̎̈́̅̉̿͂͑͌̚̕͘̚̕͠͝ͅͅF̷̡̨̢̢̛̗͇̫̩̮̦͇̩̰̬̻̝̝̮̩͕͈̥̳̜̦͎̗͍͍̲̞̲̲̫̫͙̣̝̬̞͍̮͒͌̈́̒̏̒͒̾̈́̕͝͝ͅU̶̡̧̪̩̙̮͖̜͕͔̫̯̘̰͍̦̮͚͈̯͓͓̜̰͈̺̯̰̙̟͇̯͆̓̏̈́̌̿̔͗̃̾̾̈̊͋̅̾̂̋̾̔͋͒̂̽̋̄͘͜͝͝ͅͅC̸̢̛̠͉̫̺̻̜̱̖͇͙̪̥̯̦̣̲̬̲̖̬̪͎̬͚̝̲̑̃̔̈́̂̈́́͋͆̄̽̓̑̿̉̆̊̂͋͑̅̊͆̀̋̃̏̌̇̀̓̚͜͝͝͝͠͠ͅK̴̡̧̢̡̩̥̙̲̯̪̻͇̭̥̟̯̫̮̝̱̹̬̙͙̣͓̹̣̠̘͓̻̙͈̪̻͍̜̤̰͈̰͈̣̯̤͚̆̄͑̄͜ͅͅ ̶̧̨̡̰̭̦͉̬̈ơ̶̧̡͕̻̹̫̣̖͓̩͓̹̺̰̱͕͈̼͚̗̲̤͍̪̹͇̞͎̤̬̙͕̺̟̹̱͓̞͖̺͓̞͆́͆͂̀̃̌͑̋̂̐͛̈͗̇̈́̿̾͑̾̈́̓̃̊͊̀̎̎̉̓̃̎̉̓̽̈̏̿͛̾͊̀̿͘͜͜͝͝͝u̵̢̡̨̨̧͈̦̲͉̭̠̹͚͎͈̱̖̜̞̥̟͎̝͙̦̝͖̠̘̙̼̥̔̽͛̂͋̊̋̾̌̆͐͆̍̄̃͛͆̄͂̾̐̏͌̈́̏̿̇̇̊̊̽̈́͗̏̑̕͘͜͠͝͝ͅt̵̢̨̡̢̟̪͎̜̟̬̖̯̱̮̺̘͕̯̲̮͖̣͔̠̙̦̦̙̝̟̳̖̙̭̞̙̮̱̞̬̭̊̏̈́̇̋̓̊̂̕͠͝.̸̡̧̢̛̘̙̼̩̗̙̲̳̘̺̦͚̭̲̦̫̘͔̱̤̫͓̺̣̟̠̙͚̟̜̺̿̈́͐̽͌͛̔̃̽̅̾̋̉̓̐͜ 

I SAID, get the FUCK out.


	6. CONSOLE I

> Reader: Choose route

> ACT I: SIDE A  


> S̸̨͔̩̱͓̪̖̠̝͙̻̺̹̟̘̣̎͌̾̓͂̈͐͊͜͝C̷͙͂͋̄̂̈̇͆̚̚͠E̶̗̦̮̖̬̝̯̰̹̿̓N̴̛̜͇̟̉͗͂̈́̈͌̍̂̃͆͊̀͒͘E̷̬̠̥̝͈̲̝̜͙̙̝̼̟̳̻̯̟̓͛͒̃̄͗̉͊͋͘ ̵̡̛͕͕̝͖͚͈͎̼͉̃͑̒̿̐̈̔͘̕͝͝Ĩ̸̧̫̫̪̟͉͖̙̝̲̇̈̅͗̕Į̵̡̢̧͚̝͓͚̰̦̦̠͇̝̟̟͛̅͋̅̋̽́̽̾̈͠ͅ:̸͕̞̙͖͚͙͍̬̃̆̎ ̷̢̫̮͉̬͎̜̻̙̫̲͔͔̅̽̌̊͐͆̂̌̇̌͜ͅT̴̛̪͎͓̘̝͕̻̗̭̫̬̠̭͖͖̦̽̊̆̈́͂̓͘͠͝Ḩ̴͔̠̹͔̜̫̳̪͇̞̦̰̀̃̒͜Ë̴͖̩́̾ ̴̛̗̫̻͛͌̐̋͛̽̈́̈́̇͘͝S̴̫̭̻̗̪̙̺̼̅͒̿͒̏̏̌̀͜͠T̶̡̥͕̗͚͍̥̜̯̘͂̂̃͗̕͘͠͝ͅŖ̵̯̭̦̠͓̹̮̭̣̼̜̝̹̦͗͑͗̄͐̆́̂͆̍͌͋̎̓͘̚I̷͎̮̙̭̮̩͑̏̂͌͝D̶̛̠̣̩̱̫̖̫̘̘͕͎̦͗̓͆̄̾̾̕͘ͅȨ̴̬̰̤̜̘̺̤̋̐̊̈́͌͗̉R̸̳͔͆̀̑͑̀̓I̵̤̝̥͈͈̺̭̤͒A̴̧̛̛̹̮̭͔̠̗͇̗̝̒̄͋͂͛ͅN̴̛̟͍̟͉͂̉̓̃ ̵̗͓̼̱̤̱̬̭͖̰̗̗̺̤͉͓̐̂̓͋͐̾̽̓͝Ḏ̸̛̊̿̌̓̓̐̌̐͂̐̆̓̚I̴̧̱̪̙͚̘͙̰͇͉̙͖̮̋̈́̆̇̿̚͜ͅR̴̨̛̛̝͓̣̾̒͛̂̓͗̔̔̓̿͑̚͠K̸̯̭̩̰̖̄͂̋̉͋͐̆̎̊͋̊̑̅̕͝Ạ̷̢̡̫̤͎͔̼͕͉̮̫̺̗̺̣̌ͅL̸̢̰͉̝͙̳̗̖̫̙̝̣̞̀̇̓͗̊͘O̷̡̠̥̥̫͇͇̱͈͕͓̪̪̫̬̍̈͗̍̒͊͘͜͜G̴̡̪͕̳̺̰̞̼̯̭̺̫̯͊͗͋͋̏͋̏̌̀̕͘͝͝ͅͅͅƯ̴̥͒̃͐̂̌̓̈́́E̶̢̤̦͕̠̳͎̬̦̭̫̬̞̳̓͆̏̓̍͘͘Ş̵̨̧̧͈̥̮̻͍̰̱̞̘͕̟̃͐͋͐͗̊̽͂̕͝

> [Excellent selection.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46383967)

> Free will is a lie. Haven't you learnt that by now? Have you even been reading this ergodic, signiconic multimedia fanfiction masquerading as both a piece of theater and novel simultaneously, with gratuitous elements of metatextual circumlocution? Your density almost begins to surprise me. I'm starting to fear that you might not even understand what intertextuality or diegesis is. The entire idea of this story is to create the illusion of mimesis while artfully employing the diegetic arts in a deliberately self-aware, self-lampooning ploy, in order to give the audience an elevated catharsis through the fusion of theatrical and literary art, with some gaming references scattered around in the spirit of Homestuck itself. You're being a terrible guest. Will I even get to employ my jocular jousts about La mort de l'auteur? I am an excellent host, but the behavior you are exhibiting stretches the definition of social decorum so far it is bursting at the seams. If you were my protege, you would be enrolled in a rather strict etiquette class this very moment. We haven't even touched on the fact that you were instructed to "Get the FUCK out," and for some mystifying reason, are still here. Can't you tell when you've exhausted your welcome? 


	7. ACT I: SIDE A

**DIVINE BREAKUP: TROUBLE IN PARADISE?**  
A few days ago, some commotion was heard in the Consort Kingdom, where the two notorious lovebirds, the stars of the hit show Rumble in da Pumpkin Patch, reside. While official sources refuse to confirm the existence of an amorous connection, the public certainly has drawn its conclusions. No conclusive eyewitness accounts were gleaned, but according to the local citizens, the God of Hope's mansion has been terribly noisy for the last few days! What could be going on? TURN TO PAGE 10 TO READ WHAT THE PEOPLE HAVE TO SAY!

  
  


**MISSING: GOD OF HEART NOT SEEN IN DAYS**  
Earlier this morning, our paper received a concerned enquiry from a local citizen regarding the whereabouts of Dirk Strider, the God of Heart. Since he's a God, he can't be in any trouble, but the consort kingdom has been getting terribly antsy looking for their beloved ruler. He is quite the local fixture. Some of them have even taken to styling themselves after him, wearing trendy triangular shades, leading to a massive boost in local economy. Continued on Page 5.

  
**_THE DAILY RUSTIC_ **  
**SALACIOUS SEXPLOITS**

According to our eagle-eyed reporters, a certain rump was spotted in a less than reputable establishment last night... While moral propriety is certainly called into question, we can't deny that our reporter didn't enjoy the eyeful she got... And oh, she came in late and disheveled for work today? Wonder what's up with that... PICTURES ON PAGE 8!

  
  


_**TAKE A STAND ******_ ****  
** **

Contributed by an anonymous D.E.

There comes in a life in every man's life when he must ask himself what he stands for. And yes, I do mean "man." As in homo sapien. As in _human._ While "political correctness" is all well and good, isn't there a limit on it? How long must man fetter himself for the benefit of the comfort of the masses? Is "political correctness" not the new opiate of the masses? For too long we have tried to avoid the hard topics, the hard truths of what it means to exist on Earth C. The truth is that humans are the most downtrodden, the most oppressed class on this alleged paradise planet. We live amongst the insectoid trolls - yes, I know that's offensive, but isn't it true? Are they not just glorified insects who use their extensive lifespans, psychic powers and superior strength to subtly suppress the common working man? Do they not hoard wealth and sequester themselves in their own tight-knit communities, of "rusties" and "bluebloods," refusing to interact with the inferior human? How many times have troll attacks on humans been swept under the rug because of their subtle but nefarious political sway, greased by the cowardice of human leaders who refuse to take a stand for fear of "disturbing the peace?" Since when have we learned to fear conflict, learned to appease? Why should we not take a stand? For our rights, for our very humanity? Our new presidential candidate Jane Crocker seems to understand this. For once, there's a god on our side. Rise up, people. Take a stand. The time to act is nigh.

  
**CELEBRITY GOSSIP**  
**DID HE _CHEAT?_ IS SHE _PREGNANT?_ ******

  
Reports have surfaced that model and star of the silver screen KITTY GALORE, has had a certain carnal tryst with JAKE ENGLISH, God of Hope, but better known as the star of the hit show RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH! Mr. English's tastes for adventure and intrigue are well-documented, so him hooking up with KITTY GALORE doesn't seem far-fetched. Not to mention she's the star of his favorite franchise, AVATAR, BUT MAKE IT EARTH C. In it, she plays the strikingly sapphire PUSSYTIRI, the sexy, sexy mind-meld alien goddess with a certain fetish for humans. She appears to be heavily pregnant and was rather distraught when we saw her, stating that Mr. English had suddenly "ghosted" her and "refused to pick up any of her calls," despite previously "professing his love." We admit that we weren't really listening to what she was saying, but hey, the lady's buxom. Woof. We don't blame Mr. English for jumping on that, but would it kill him to just talk to her? After all, he's going to be a daddy in a totally different way soon! Still, while we know Mr. English has always gone both ways... We still have to wonder what's become of his rather high-profile male "companion." Nothing's official, of course, but do you really have to be a genius to connect the dots? Unlike the other tabloids, we don't just trade in gossip... We trade in so much gossip they become facts! And the fact is, I'm tellin' ya, someone got dumped. TURN TO PAGE 4 TO READ MORE FACTUAL SPECULATION.

****

****  
  
  


# DRUGS ARE COOL NOW, KIDS!

  
Ever heard of the HOPESPLOSION? Or the HEART ATTACK? Yup, we have it. In buckets, in fact. It's taking the underground by storm. Everyone wants a piece of it. And I mean, who wouldn't? It feels really good. If you're lonely, or just bored, this is the thing for you. Love, intimacy, friendship... they're all just chemical compounds and we've got 'em right here. And you can huff it. Or snort it, smoke it, plain old eat it... Once it hits, you'll be in a never-before traversed plane of ecstasy. Trust me, it works. We even have some, well... high-profile clients, let's leave it at that, shall we? Call 1111-1204-0413 to pick up your stash today. And hey, if you're a cop - FUCK OFF.

  


**YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO DECAPITATE ME: SALES OF CHILDREN'S TOY RISE**  
While the God of Heart has not been spotted in public for some time now, that certainly hasn't stopped the meteoric rise of his merchandise. The popular children's toy, a doll modeled after the God of Heart himself featuring a detachable neck, plastic katana and a touch activated voice recording that requests the player to decapitate it, has been experiencing a huge surge in popularity. While our hardworking statisticians are still unsure of why it has suddenly exploded in popularity, some conspiracy theorists think numbers are being artificially inflated to further inflate Mr. Strider's economic importance, further lining his pockets and helping to prop up the presidential popularity of business magnate Ms. Crocker, God of Life. However, those are mere rumors spread by anti-establishment insurgents, and a reputable newspaper such as us would have no business endorsing such a frankly ridiculous viewpoint. Vote Crocker! TURN TO PAGE 5 FOR FURTHER UNBIASED COMMENTARY.

This report was sponsored by HONEST AND UPFRONT REPORTING, a subsidiary of Crockercorp.

  


Dearest Father,

I am penning you this correspondence if only to remove my beleaguered twin brother from my presence. While I have no reservations about your self-imposed isolation, and find it a refreshing break from the prattling excursuses you loathe to pause, his overbearing concern has not gone unnoticed. Therefore, as an act of service to the Stri-Londe family unit, I am extending a formal invitation to you to join us, the pitiful Stri-Londes abandoned by the family patriarch after undoubtedly experiencing another case of adolescent lovesickness, for a night of "grubflix and chill [sic.]" this Friday evening.

Eternally loving regards,  
Rose

P.S. Roxy misses you too. Come home, Dirk.

  


Jane. Cancel everything. There's nothing to explain. It's over.  
\- D.S.


	8. INTERMISSION II: PRESS TOUR

  


ALTERNATE TITLE: TWO BROS SITTING 5 FEET APART IN A PRESS TOUR 'CAUSE THEY'RE NOT GAY.

  
  


INTERVIEWER: Today we have the unique pleasure of having Mr. Jake English and Mr. Dirk Strider here with us. They’re here to promote the new season of their show, RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH.  


  
  


INTERVIEWER: Well, I’m sure you’ve had enough of everyone asking you what it was like to create the universe,  
INTERVIEWER: So why don’t we skip to the hard hitters?  
JAKE: Sure thing!  
DIRK: Go for it.

  


  
  


INTERVIEWER: Looks like I’ve got the green light, folks!  
INTERVIEWER: So what are you most excited about for this season of RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH?  
JAKE: The scrums of course! Gosh i cant wait to see even MORE automatomic fisticuffs! Im quite aware of the boon of balladry but i simply cant deny that what really gets me going lickety-split is the altercations!  
INTERVIEWER: Well, you certainly know your passions, Jake! What about you, Dirk? What are you most excited for?  
DIRK: Programming new battlebots. Never gets old. I’ve been working on some sick new linguistic legwork for all of them.  
INTERVIEWER: Sounds great! You’re certainly the brains of the operation, aren’t you?  
DIRK: Nah. Jake’s pretty solid with the bots too. I’ve just got more time on my hands.  
INTERVIEWER: I love how you two support each other! Advertising the show as “Trading blows with best bros” was as honest as it gets.

  


  
  


INTERVIEWER: But I’ve got to wonder. And now, stop me if this gets too personal,  
INTERVIEWER: But according to the tabloids, you two have been embroiled in some sort of ardent affair?  
JAKE: ...  
DIRK: Yeah, we’ve been sneakin’ ‘round behind closed doors. Feeling each other up, getting all up in each others’ pants and shit.  
DIRK: The pants being a nice, healthy dose, of mind your own fuckin’ business.

  


  
  


JAKE: Dirk!  
JAKE: Apologies he doesnt mean to be rude.  
JAKE: ...But hes got a fucking point!  
JAKE: Whats it with tom dick and harry poking around in our private matters! Its like the whole fucking regiments been ordered to investigate us. Ive had it up to here! Cant two good friends with a strong fraternal rapport just be bros without everyone presuming theyre beaus of the amorous inclination!  
JAKE: To speak plainly madam i think its malarkey to act like youve got a single ounce of common regard-

  


  
  


DIRK: Jake. Calm down.  
DIRK: It’s just another vapid reporter doing her overpaid job. Look at her. She’s just here as the eye candy.  
INTERVIEWER: ...I’m really sorry if I’ve caused you two any offense whatsoever-  
JAKE: Your platitudinous horseshit isnt doing jack to offset the great offense youve bestowed upon me and my *friendly* compadre.  
JAKE: But fine. Dirk if you would.  
DIRK: It’s fine. We forgive you. Now tell the crew to cut the fuckin’ cameras.  
DIRK: None of this shit makes it to air, you hear me?

  
  


CAMERA: CUT  


  
  


JAKE: Ugh dirk im sorry for flying off the handle earlier but i just cant take the entire fucking ensemble sticking their noses where it doesnt belong. Why does everyone presuppose were in a affaire de coeur.  
JAKE: Not to mention that new fad about the “shipping” and “yaois” or whatchamacallit?  
JAKE: Its some pseudo anime bullcrap. You ought to know.  
DIRK: They’re just reporters doing their jobs, Jake. You should be used to it by now. They have to mine drama for the papers and programs to sell.  
DIRK: We’re just lucky I got them to delete the footage before it could end up online.  
JAKE: Oh kicking christ imagine the ordeal it would be if JANE were to discover our little misfortune.  
JAKE: Shed be on both our asses about our good standings and repute.  
JAKE: You know i love her but sometimes she can be such a shrew. *shudders* Not to mention when she turned into a downright she-devil. I know her brain was scrambled and bamboozled all topsy-turvy but gosh she was such a c-  
DIRK: Careful, Jake.  
JAKE: Oh right. Well. Shes one devious bitch for sure.  
DIRK: I never thought you felt that strongly about her. Jane’s got her flaws, but we all do. Cut her some slack. You know she’s trying.  
JAKE: Now that you mention it it is rather peculiar that im so chuffed about my dear friend. Ill admit its all been rather queer as of late.  
JAKE: I fathom these thoughts that im quite sure are mine yet just seem a teensy bit outside the realm of my quotidian mental machinations.  
JAKE: Its like someones conceiving these convictions pretending to be me but they havent quite figured the whole bailiwick out yet.  
JAKE: So im left with this strange sort of dissonance of being me but not quite me. Like im me but exaggerated around the edges.  
JAKE: Look at what i just said! Conceiving these convictions. What sort of pseudo-victorian bullshit is that trying to masquerade as.  
JAKE: Basically what im saying is im me but not entirely unspoiled and it makes my head hurt and makes me wonder if ive been knocking a few too many back lately. I just dont feel quite up to dick.

Looks like I’ve got something to work on, then.

DIRK: Easing up on the drinks couldn’t hurt.  
DIRK: But I’ve been feeling a similar way. Sometimes I’ve found myself thinking thoughts I’d never have, and yet seem so uncannily like myself they scare me. It’s like the limits of my self are being stretched. Almost as if I’ve dug deeper into what it means to be me.  
DIRK: Maybe this is what growing up is about. Becoming more “you,” if that’s even possible.  
DIRK: I used to think the self was some sort of ultimate truth, a cathartic light at the end of the tunnel. A light I had to reach at all costs. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve started to think that maybe none of that is important at all. It probably doesn’t even exist.  
DIRK: I mean, how ridiculous would it be for an “ultimate self” to exist?  
DIRK: It would mean we couldn’t grow. Would there even be a point to being alive, to being human, then? Being a person is all about growing into someone better, someone who by definition, is not-you. Or is at least a different iteration of you.  
DIRK: If our selves were truly defined, truly set in stone, the very definition of being human would be nullified.  
DIRK: To be human is to grow.  
DIRK: And isn’t that a wonderful thing?  
DIRK: I mean, who knows what would happen if we couldn’t. We’d probably all be trapped as our worse, most basic, most exaggerated selves forever. Instead of organic beings capable of evolutionary change, we’d be about as complex as Ken dolls stuck in Barbie’s dream dollhouse. Reduced to mere templates and symbols of personhood, the most reduced form of what it means to be “us,” with no capacity to change or grow. To do what separates life from inanimate, static objects.  
DIRK: We’d be like shitty flat characters in a long-running sitcom, slowly flanderized into becoming hollow shells of our once fleshed out, organic selves, our defining qualities exaggerated, for the sake of entertainment.  
DIRK: How sick would that be?  
DIRK: We’d be our worst selves. 

  
And now for a television break.

  
  


INTERVIEWER: Today we have the unique pleasure of having Mr. Jake English and Mr. Dirk Strider here with us. They’re here to promote the new season of their show, RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH.  
JAKE: Howdy!  
DIRK: Hey.  
INTERVIEWER: The new season just sounds great! I hear it’s got lots of rap and robots. Just like the previous seasons! Why mess with a formula that works, right?  
DIRK: You got it.  
INTERVIEWER: Oh, I just LOVE your show! Do you two have any messages for your legions of adoring fans?  
JAKE: *double pistols and a wink* Much obliged!  
DIRK: Thanks for watching. We’ll see y’all on the big screen.  
INTERVIEWER: Squee!! Oh man, I am just SO EXCITED for a next season! Be sure to tune in for RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH: BACK IN THE SADDLE this Friday at 6p.m.!  
INTERVIEWER: Thanks so much for coming, Mr. English and Mr. Strider. It was just an ABSOLUTE PLEASURE to meet the both of you.

  


  
  


CREDITS: ROLL 

  
  



	9. ACT II: SIDE B

He's at the mansion.

In Jake's bed.

Again. 

Another night of fervent longing and regret.

He hates this. 

He hates needing others. And more than anything, he hates needing Jake.

He looks over at Jake's sleeping form, and almost winces from the tenderness he feels at Jake's languid, sleeping form. His lips quirked upwards into a ghost of that familiar, winning smile, locks of his soft hair falling over his temple and framing his gentle face, long eyelashes making shadows on his skin. Jake is curled up slightly, nestled against a pillow, just like a kid. He's always been a little childlike, but Dirk would be lying if he said he didn't love that about him. Dirk can feel the warmth radiating off his body, and something inside him twists and turns and he tries to shove it back down before it can make him curl up against Jake and rest his face in the crook of that shoulder seemingly made for his chin and soothe his desperate heartbeat. He can't look. It just hurts to look. It hurts to want. It hurts to need. It hurts to love.

He tries to get out of bed, but Jake rolls over and grabs for him. Jake's still asleep, and he's just reaching for another pillow, but something about Jake reaching out for _him_ makes Dirk stop and still. Jake latches onto his waist and his weight drags Dirk back down, into pillows and duvets and Jake's arms, and into the old feelings that are always just burning underneath the surface, feelings Dirk tries to extinguish but never can, feelings that burn him up from the inside and make him feel sixteen and stupid again, sixteen and breaking his own heart. Or maybe he feels thirteen, thirteen and too insecure and too needy, thirteen and naïve and on the cusp of discovering what it really means to want something more than you want to want. Or maybe he feels eighteen and foolish, eighteen and hung up on someone who he can clearly never have, not in the way that he wants or needs, eighteen and hung up on Jake English who's hopeful and innocent and sweet and cruel in all the right ways and who doesn't know any better, and who still makes his heart skip every time he smiles, and who breaks his heart a little every time too. He feels like a moth drawn to a flame, a flame he knows will burn him up, but one he willingly burns himself on no matter how many times he has to dress his wounds. He can't help it. But he wishes he could.

Jake is nuzzling his side now, doing that adorable thing he does in his sleep sometimes, trying to get closer to whoever he's holding even though they're already skin-to-skin. It melts Dirk's heart (but when doesn't it?) and he gently pushes Jake off so he can turn to face him properly, so he can wrap his arms around Jake and just give into himself for a moment. Jake always smells the same. It's nice. It's familiar. He smells like vaguely floral shampoo and freshly laundered clothes, smells like the sort of person people just want to hug, smells like the person Dirk always finds himself getting lost in, no matter how many times he tries to chart a course out. He smells like the closest thing Dirk's ever had to a home. Dirk's arms are casually slung over Jake's shoulders now, and he reaches up to stroke Jake's hair, trying not to wake him. Jake might not have a problem with it, but Dirk finds displays of affection, of vulnerability, much harder to perform when there's a witness. Can't let anyone know how much you care, or it's just rounds in their pistol. Jake's hair is soft and wavy, cool and silky to the touch. Dirk curls a few strands around his finger and feels a smile start to surface. He loves this. He really does. Just being here with Jake. Feeling him here. Knowing that for a moment, the world is just him and Jake wrapped around each other without anything else interfering. No more insecurities, no more arguments, no more jealousy, just them, in each other's embrace. 

Jake shifts, and for a moment, Dirk's heart freezes. Is Jake waking up? No, he's just dreaming. Dirk exhales a shallow breath of relief and untangles his finger from Jake's mop, brushing some stray hairs out of Jake's face so he can just... look at it. So he can burn this moment into his memory. So if he never gets something this good, this perfect again, he'll always have this to look back on. He smiles. Then he closes his eyes and pulls Jake closer. He's been lost at sea recently, but at least he's got something to hold onto. In Jake's embrace, he lets dreams take him. They're good dreams, of course. Is there a chance they wouldn't be, not when he's being held by person who taught him what it meant to really love?

Next to him, Jake opens his eyes. Dirk's so gullible. All it takes to convince him someone is asleep is closed eyes and a steady breath. But Jake doesn't mind. He never has. He knows Dirk is complicated and neurotic and afraid, and it's never made him love Dirk any less. Besides, getting your hair stroked is always nice. Jake pulls Dirk closer and falls back into sleep, and it's not a ruse this time.

They dream together.


	10. δ̴̝͍͚͆͜ΐ̸̺̲̂̚ή̷̳̜͗̏̽γ̴̩̤̦͉͆̽η̴̛̳̂͜͝σ̸̢̰̜͒͌ι̷̢̗͝ς̷̨̛͎̣̣̔͌͝ ̶̈́́͗̆͜I̷̺̭͓̊:̸͍̪̩̽̐̉̈́: SOMEWHERE ELSE...

SOMEWHERE ELSE...

  
  


DIRK: Oh, so that's where this thing went.  
DIRK: And here I was wondering why all these damn voyeurs were still ogling us.   
DIRK: Still, I've got a proposition to make. In the interests of the narrative, of course.   
DIRK: While it's all well and good to indulge my own narcissism by chronicling my personal history in the ouroboric record of my selfhood,  
DIRK: I can't hold anyone's attention without providing them with the coveted "content."  
DIRK: So I'll indulge my attitudinizing sensibilities, and let you tune the fuck in. Besides, it can't possibly hurt. Not like you can reach through the burst through the bubble of extra-canonicity to get where the action is, anyway.  
DIRK: As a peace offering, I'll even tell you what the glitched text said. "The Striderian Dirkalogues." I'm sure you can put the pieces together by yourself.  
DIRK: Rose. If you would?  


  
  


ROSEBOT: Must you really involve me in your inane bullshit, Father?  
ROSEBOT: For all your elocution about narrative relevance, I know you realize just as well as I do that we're hardly situated in the correct location within the "Furthest Ring," if this can even be called that, to be influencing canon whatsoever.  
ROSEBOT: You're just bored, Dirk.  
ROSEBOT: Get a hobby.  


  
  


ROSEBOT: You're not even a good storyteller.  


  
  


.  
.  
.  
A PERQUISITE FOR THE ATTENTIVE READER:

  
  


TEREZI: ...  
TEREZI: WHY WONT TH3Y 3VER SHUT UP  
TEREZI: C4NT 4 G1RL P4SS OUT FROM R4MP4NT 1RR3SPONS1BL3 S3LF-D3STRUCT1VE SUBST4NCE 4BUSE TR1GG3R3D BY D3PR3SS1ION GU1LT S3LF-LO4TH1NG LOSS GR13F G3N3R4L SU1IC1DAL 1MPULS3S 4ND 4N 3NT1IRE COCKT41L OF P3RSONAL 1SSU3S 1N P3AC3 ON TH1S FUCK1NG SP4CE 4RK  
TEREZI: GOG D4MN  
TEREZI: L3T A B1TCH DR1NK H3RS3LF TO D3ATH 1N P34C3  



	11. ACT III: SIDE B

Dirk Strider is drowning.

.  
.  
.  


The splintering won't stop. He can barely get any reprieve, now - every time Dirk loosens his grip and lets himself drift he finds his mind flooded with memories - or predictions - of a thousand different timelines, all dead now, but still very much alive in his overstretched psyche. He's leaning into it now, giving himself up to it. There isn't much to do these days, not with Jake sequestering himself away, well, maybe just away from him, Jane busying herself with needless and frankly tactless campaigning, Roxy doing... whatever Roxy does, and Dave and Rose both enjoying blissful domestic partnership. He doesn't want to intrude. It's better this way, he tells himself, as he turns the key in his lock and sits down for what he knows will be another mind-melding journey to some sort of bullshit astral plane of ideal selfhood. It's better this way, he tells himself, leaning back on his mattress and already feeling the splinters clawing at the edges of his mind. It's better, when he's not around to hurt them. It's not as if there has ever been a time when Dirk Strider wasn't afraid of himself. Maybe there was, once, before he knew what it meant to be someone, to have a sense of self, but the moment the nebulous patterns of neuropsychology settled into a discernible being known as Dirk Strider, he knew to be afraid. Or at least that's what he tells himself. 

It's hard to feel human. Not just like this, with his sense of self, the boundaries of one's mind, the natural conflict the self enters into with with the external world to create definition through violence, deliquescing into some kind of blueprint for Dirkness, the perfect template upon which all vectors of Dirk stem from. Or maybe the vectors create that blueprint with every choice they make and every path they tread - who could say? Do you perform the cruel action because you're cruel, or are you cruel because you perform the cruel action? Chicken or the egg? It's an apostasy, almost - to be so self-consuming and self-defining any opportunity for the world to shape you cannot exist by virtue of the reality you live in, because what else gives humanity? By renouncing the opportunity for growth, the ability to establish connections, however fraught, with the common man, can one still be said to be human?

Have you ever been in a story? Any kind, really. You think you're real, but what if your life is not a collection of tales messily stitched together by the idea of a self? You can't very well think you're the same person you were last week, let alone when you were a child. Is a self continuous? Or is it just the label that is? And is that label the glue that keeps all your anecdotes and misadventures and triumphs and debacles strung together in some sort of semi-cohesive narrative, something that is in itself beyond reason, with logic and rationality applied as a costume to make the absurd and asinine perspicuous, and if you're fortunate, meaningful? Possibly even significant or consequential. And in that story, have you become a certain sort of someone? Maybe you're the responsible leader, or the simpering coward. Or maybe you're something far more ordinary, like a son or daughter, an employee or a boss. It doesn't matter, really. It's just a role. And don't people grow into their roles? Think back to a time before you had your role. You apply it in retrospect, don't you? When you were an infant, I doubt you were cognizant of your role as your parent's child, and yet your impression of that epoch is nonetheless inextricably intertwined with the idea of being someone's child. People grow into their roles. Think of it like method acting. That's simply what life is, and the curtains don't close till you expire. And now, think of what might happen to someone who was assigned the role of a predator, a trial, a villain. Not just in one life, but in almost all of them. Tragic, isn’t it? It makes you wonder just what the hereditary, inescapable, all-consuming flaw running through their veins is. Well, don’t let me interrupt any further. Let’s get back to his story, shall we?

  
He's swept away by the undertow, dragged deeper into the ocean of his own making. Does he even deserve to escape? If you really think about it - isn't this a self-made hell? If you can't face yourself, who should be able to? Don't we all bear the cross of who we are? Do you even deserve to stay as yourself if you can't even defend your own sanctity? Asking for help is supposed to be easy, but it's only easy when you deserve it. And Dirk isn't sure if he does. Not after everything he's done. Maybe this is just retribution. There's a part of him that accepts it because he knows his deserves it, as irrational as it is - as if Paradox Space hands has ever been fair or given anyone what they deserved - and another part that wants it. They're both the selfish parts, because what part of him isn't? But they're selfish in different ways. The part that accepts it as punishment is the part attuned to self-flagellation and penance, the part that wants it is the part attuned to egotism and self-obsession. If we were really being frank about it, though, we'd just say it was the same part. In the stillness of his mind, as it comes unshackled and untethered, Dirk pauses to consider just what makes him who he is. He's not so dense that he doesn't realize he's not quite as self-aware or introspective as he makes himself out to be. In the stillness, he can admit that he doesn't really know who he is at all. He's a paradox of a person, somehow accommodating as many antimonies as there are facets of Dirkness, a philosopher prince unable to answer the most basic questions of what it even means to be a philosopher or a prince, or a teen boy turned god turned a lonely almost adult in a world he still can't quite understand. As a child, he tried to solve himself like a mechanic, building robotic compatriots not just to ease the loneliness, but to build mirrors, till he finally succeeded and realized he couldn't accept what he saw, but was still unable to tear his eyes away. He misses Hal, sometimes, but only in the way of missing familiarity and attention rather than missing warmth or love or whatever it is you're supposed to miss, and anyway, what's the difference? He misses having someone in his corner, or maybe he misses being in someone else's corner, because as much as they fought, and as bad as everything got, it was easier to hate himself when he was someone else. Sometimes he feels like he's filling Hal's shoes, playing at being some sort of mechanical martyr, sacrificing his suffering for a purpose that's really just bargaining for his own peace of mind, because he can't rest without earning it. He wonders how everyone else rests. Now that there’s no Prospit or Derse to dream of, or dreambubbles to explore, do they slumber? Do they just explore the fantasies of their own sleeping minds, or do they dream of the waking world? Or do they dream of nothing at all? Dirk’s tried to sleep, but the only things that come to him are long hours spent staring at shadowed ceiling, till he gets too exhausted to try any longer, and just goes to lose himself in something else like a project or another spiral. It's not that he's never slept, it's just that sleep is a release he doesn't get often. It requires specific circumstances, to say the least. He feels like he’s playing at being a person, really. There are so many things he can’t do. So many things he should be able to, things that come naturally to everyone else but he has to cut his teeth trying at only to fail. Suspended in his own mind, at times like this, he wonders if he should just give up, and give into being whatever he really is, for better or for worse. There are only so many times you can fail before it starts to get pathetic instead of awkwardly inspiring, and he’s passed that threshold a long time ago. It’s a bad habit of his. Turning everything into a parable or a story. Trying to assign meaning where there isn’t any, where it’s just experiential and he’s just a human being living his fucking life, but then again, he isn’t, is he?

.  
.  
.  


In the darkness of his empty apartment, behind shades and gently closed eyelids, Dirk Strider starts to swim. 


	12. FLASHBACKS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Choose Your Own Adventure section starts now, so you have to click "next chapter" on this chapter to get to the next chapter, instead of just clicking the AO3 "next chapter" button.

The splinters slip in and out.

  
Sometimes Dirk feels like he’s someone else, someone so close they could be a second skin, and yet distinctly someone not him. Someone who’s him in all the right ways, someone who’s too right about it, too uncannily familiar to be him. But mostly it’s just memories that flash in and out of his mind, snippets and slivers of other lives and timelines, slowly pieced together to form the bigger picture of what it means to be Dirk Strider.

CLICK THE CAPTIONS!

  


[The memories of being B1's Dirk Strider slip into your psyche sometimes, bringing with them the taste of iron on your tongue.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46759693)

  


[Being omniscient. It's a wonderful thing. Orchestrating the entry of Lord English doesn't weigh so well on the conscience, though. But then again, you guys were always pretty chummy.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46388575#login3)

  


[Imagine being such a terrible boyfriend your ex makes himself a perfect version of you.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46388575#login3)

  


[It's like looking in a slightly warped mirror, looking at yourself from the shades instead of through them.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46767868)

[NEXT CHAPTER.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46716070)


	13. CONSOLE II

Look - if you want to strike out so badly on your own, try out your free will and agency so badly, why don't you click [this link](https://www.homestuck.com/story/4043)? [This one](https://www.homestuck.com/story/7672), [right here](https://www.homestuck.com/epilogues). But hey, I'm not making you do anything you don't want to. You really get agency this time. I promise. I promise that if you don't click it it'll be better, though. It's all gonna be just fine. If you keep listening to me, that is. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. But if your fingers are _really_ that itchy, well, I suppose I can't stop you now, can I?

Well, I could. But that's really not the point of the lesson.


	14. BRO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are discussions of abuse in this chapter. Finish reading it before you pull the plug.
> 
> If you're on mobile, read this chapter horizontally.

There are flashes of another life.

A life where he’s older, stronger, harder.

A life where he doesn’t suffer from the Striderian curse of logorrhea, curiously.

A life where his speech is short. And simple. And direct.

Reminds him of someone he used to know. Someone he could have been friends with, real friends with, in another life. 

Who’s to say it wasn’t this one?

It’s an almost idyllic existence, actually - remembering it feels very much like remembering some sort of bucolic, halcyon existence - it’s peaceful in its own way. For everything he knew about the inevitable apocalypse, he did get to spend all his time visiting sick record stores, recording beats, building puppets, and tending to an adorable flock of highly pornographic, exceedingly earnest chatbots. Man. Some of that shit is so graphic it even gets to _him._ Maybe he’ll lean into it as he gets older, and maybe it’s an acquired taste, but some of the snuff zips straight past titillating into disturbing. It’s just too bloody for his tastes. A little danger can be sexy and all, but grinding up puppets with blood pellets stuffed inside them? Jesus, some of them even had full on viscera inside. How the fuck does **that** get anyone going? That aside, though, it’s… nice. His days are filled with all his favorite things - with Cal, puppets, more puppets, good rap, bad rap, porn, Tony Hawk, shitty Japanese swords, and Dave. 

Dave.

Now that’s a double-edged sword.

He can’t lie. He was rough on the kid. Maybe he even crossed a few lines. He knows it crossed a few wires in Dave’s head. But hey, a few concussions never hurt nobody. All part and parcel of growing up. He thinks about what Dave said about him, how he felt like Bro was an impenetrable wall, about how he never spoke - but since when were words ever their language? No. It’s been years, since they’ve really spoke. Because their language was made of steel and fists and blood and bone, made of dressings and stitches and steel and _strength._ Dirk made him perfect. The perfect weapon, the perfect tool, the perfect player. The perfect winner. Some might have called it abuse, sure, and it’s no secret that Dave did - but if abuse was all they saw, they weren’t looking hard enough. He was weak. Mediocre. You made him strong. Perfect. To make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs. There’s always a price. And maybe that price is flinching at the sound of metal or being unable to sit with his back to the door, or even not always leaving one earbud out so he can listen out for an attack another training session, and maybe it’s even never being able to let himself be touched without trembling, his chest caving in on itself and his body going cold as it tenses and steels for the next blow that will never come, but isn’t it worth it? Power purchased with pain. That’s the tradeoff we all make. Dirk suddenly recalls Dave’s face, the accusation in it, the silent asseveration of _you hit me because it felt good,_ the condemnation too heavy he couldn’t even let it pass through his lips. He parses this thought in his mind. There’s something about breaking something small, something weak, something pathetic, that twists and turns and sends shivers of something close to pleasure up his spine. Oh, maybe that’s why he liked the snuff so much. Makes sense now. But that wasn’t what this was. This was chiseling a block of marble till it became a masterpiece, hammering a piece of steel till it shined. It wasn’t malice. It wasn’t sadism. And it certainly wasn’t _abuse._ It was necessary. And if it was necessary, wasn’t it right? It’s really not like it was all bad. For all the necessity, they had their good moments. Moments that weren’t necessary. Moments like guiding a smaller hand across a turntable, palm clasped over the tiny hand still with baby fat on it, applying just enough pressure to scratch the record, or hearing their first jam get played back to them. Or leaving passwords and links around the house, because even though they couldn’t speak, they could witness each other. Communication has never been their family’s strong suit, but it would be unfair to say they didn’t try. There’s a tenderness there that goes denied, because it’s easier to believe that hurt and love are mutually exclusive. But if it wasn’t love, what was it? What was polishing swords in silence, and before that, guiding small hands holding a dagger against a whetstone? What was the warmth in the embrace after a round of training that went slightly too far, Dave curled up against his chest, shaking but still leaning in? What was the silent understanding that permeated their household, the unspoken tenderness, because it was too fragile to ever acknowledge? It was an easily shattered, wispy sort of thing, the kind of thing that would splinter and disintegrate if you ever gazed at it with too much intensity, the kind of thing that was never supposed to exist, not in a household of silence and strength and steel. It was the tenderness you feel looking at something you’ve seen a million times, but you’re seeing it differently for the first time, because you understand. It was sort of tenderness born from suffering for so long, you start to make meaning out of it. Philistines would call it Stockholm Syndrome, but they’re called philistines for a reason. It was beautiful, in its own fractured way, and maybe no one but Dirk would ever understand that. Maybe they don’t have to. Because what’s done is done, no matter what anyone says after the fact. What he did was right. It was better than right. It was perfect. He made Dave perfect. And no one was grateful. ‘Nuff said.  


Wait, no. No. This is all wrong.

What he did was wrong. It was fucked up. Seriously, it’s not “training” if all you do is beat the shit out of your fucking _son._ There’s nothing good, nothing noble, nothing _right_ about taking an infant and training him and twisting him till he became like you. Till he became like us. Dirk hates to admit it, but Dave was right. Maybe there really wasn’t anything inside Bro. Maybe it was just duty and ambition and ownership. Ownership of Dave. Maybe that’s why he did the things he did. Because Dave was just another thing. Just another part of the Strider household of puppets. The runty afterthought to them, in fact. It was fucked up and awful and just what Dave needed. He needed to get strong. He needed someone to train him to survive Sburb. Think of all the timelines, Dirk. Think about them. Think about the ones where the Betas failed and you never even got to exist, not like this. Think about all of Dave’s incompetent friends dying, dying because they didn’t have someone who cared enough to forge them in fire. You did him a favor. And sure, it hurt, but doesn’t everything worthwhile? 

Doesn’t it, Dirk?

‘Course it does.


	15. ACT IIII: SIDE B

Being Dirk Strider is an endlessly recursive existence, and existence that consumes itself as sustenance to keep consuming, an existence that deconstructs to reconstruct and reconstructs to deconstruct - after all, isn't radical self-change also radical self-destruction? An ordinary individual might simply state that Dirk is blinded by his own ego, but that would be simplifying the problem a little too much for his Daedalian tastes. He is lost at sea, drifting further into the ocean of himself, which one might define as ego, but the farther from shore he drifts, the closer he drifts to himself, too. Maybe he should just give into the pull of his own gravity instead of allowing others to mould and warp him, and maybe it’s self-important to presume that he is the truly the one who gets to dictate his own fate, but is being self-important when you only have yourself really a sin? When you’re this deeply ensconced in the folds of yourself, wrapped up in self after self after self, trying desperately to control all the variables of an inherently organic being, maybe the only thing you can really do is to disconnect from your humanistic sensibilities, cut off your emotion, in order to connect more deeply with yourself. There’s a part of Dirk that’s aware that he’s being a hypocrite, refusing to imbibe the lessons he tries to drill into others, but most of him is too busy drowning in his sense of self to really care about that, in the sense of getting better. Instead, he turns it ugly and in on himself, using it to push the of his own knife of his own selfishness and sin in further and twist it.

It’s an art, really. Asphyxiating yourself on your own pain and feeling the burn in your lungs and willingly inhaling to feel it again, banishing your self-awareness of your willing self-destructiveness with your waning consciousness as the oxygen fades from your bloodstream so you can lean into it further. As much as introspection is a prescription, predilection and preoccupation for Dirk, he’s not very good as it, is he? What good is it to constantly ruminate on yourself and reflect on all your mistakes if you pointedly refuse to grow from them, simply using it to grease the gears of your old loops and patterns, juvenile as they are. Another part of him muses about how at the end of the day, his biggest flaw, and his biggest enemy, is just himself. It’s almost funny, really, with the militant way he tried to buff out his own imperfections, that the biggest imperfection of all should be his very self, his very nature, the one thing impossible to escape. No amount of polish can make something fake genuine. There’s no point in holding on, is there, as he unbundles and splinters apart, to a self that’s fundamentally a failure. He remembers when he used to be optimistic about becoming a better person, optimistic about growing to be someone he could not hate, but that’s just a pipe dream now. He’s seen himself for what he is, elucidation purchased with the sacrifice of hope. No mask or veneer or sick anime shades can cover up the morally bankrupt exoskeleton of a person he is, so he might as well just own it before it starts to own him. Take charge of who he is, because as flawed and as hopeless as his existence as a person is, he’s an excellent mechanic. He makes things happen. And everyone needs a guy who can make things happen. Maybe he shouldn’t have all that power, because why would you ever want such a morally devoid individual to orchestrate your existence? But then again, maybe he should, because being morally devoid means operating solely on logic, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? There’s a crossing of a line, a step into unchartered territory, territory that changes you and makes you believe that you had no choice to end up there because believing otherwise would mean that everything you did up till now in the precarious decision to arrive here was a mistake, and it’s cost you so much that if you believed it your world would crumble apart, so you force yourself to believe that you didn’t have a choice, that all of this was necessary, relevant, true, essential. Rationalization is a wonderful instrument in the toolkit of the suicidal and self-destructive. Sometimes, it feels like the only place that is real is buried very, very deep inside his mind, and the world is all some kind of feverish nightmare that is as changeable and nebulous as a real dream, that slips around him and rebuilds itself in different, silky abstractions every single time he swivels his gaze around the blank, bright world. It feels like slipping in and out of a sleek simulation, only patching in as it crescendoes, feeling the waves of it break against his back, then slipping out again. He’s languorous, mind trapped in a self-aggrandizing haze, reality just a faraway refrain he’s grown tired of hearing. Admitting that feels like he’s brushing the parameters of insanity, but he’s already known that he’s been situated there for longer than his fracturing memory stretches. A good question to ask is if the insanity is the cause or merely the prognosis. The chicken or the egg? Is insane a description for what he is?

Is selfish?

Is manipulative?

Is strong?

Is weak?

Is human?

Is afraid?

Does he get assigned the descriptor because he already defined it, or does the descriptor define him? Does really matter if he is truly off the walls? Should he care? Does he even care about caring? Questions within questions. Minds within minds. Hearts within hearts. A consciousness stuck in a body losing touch with this world.

Somewhere, in his psyche, there’s a part of him telling him to surface, telling him to just let all this go, telling him to go back home to all his friends and his family and just let himself exist without worrying about what it means to exist - to let the saccharine sweetness of extra-canonical existence take him, to let himself just be happy, in a mundane, small way, the only way that really matters. The clarity of the thought cuts into his mind, and while the bleeding is a constant warm, congealing feeling by this point, solidifying into those gelatinous red chunks he’s all too familiar with, it would probably serve him well to stem the septic mess sooner rather than later. Yet there’s another part of him saying that hey, haven’t we dived too deep? If we surface now the only thing waiting for us will be the hypoxia. There’s no way to go but down, is there? 

So he dives deeper,  
  
and deeper,

and deeper.


	16. CONSOLE III

> DIRK: Dive?

> Surface.  


> Dive. 

> [Hypoxia is a scary thing, but you've been rationing your oxygen well.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46719202)

> [Into the endless depths we plunge. ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46765657)


	17. FLASHBACKS

The splinters slip in and out.

  
Sometimes Dirk feels like he’s someone else, someone so close they could be a second skin, and yet distinctly someone not him. Someone who’s him in all the right ways, someone who’s too right about it, too uncannily familiar to be him. But mostly it’s just memories that flash in and out of his mind, snippets and slivers of other lives and timelines, slowly pieced together to form the bigger picture of what it means to be Dirk Strider.

CLICK THE CAPTIONS!

  


[The memories of being B1's Dirk Strider slip into your psyche sometimes, bringing with them the taste of iron on your tongue.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46759693)

  


[Being omniscient. It's a wonderful thing. Orchestrating the entry of Lord English doesn't weigh so well on the conscience, though. But then again, you guys were always pretty chummy.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46766563)

  


[Imagine being such a terrible boyfriend your ex makes himself a perfect version of you.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46768969)

  


[It's like looking in a slightly warped mirror, looking at yourself from the shades instead of through them.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46388575#login3)

[Dive deeper.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/46721275)  



	18. DOC SCRATCH

There’s an empty life.

A life that spans so much, and so long, it might as well not be anything at all.

It’s a life that’s driven by singular purpose (not like his other lives aren’t driven by it, too), but this life is more polished than the others. 

It’s a life that professes how the pen is mightier than the sword - a life that proves it, in fact, a life that uses a typewriter with white ink and a subtle, deft hand to conduct the orchestra of Paradox Space.

It’s a life that’s been intertwined with Rose’s in ways he prefers not to think about, but then again, when all you have is unending eternity, one is bound to get bored sooner or later. And well, all men - even omniscient men with cueballs for heads - have their passions. At least he wasn’t as distasteful with her as he was with the troll girls. The entire setup with the Handmaid was just a little too close to an Asian schoolgirl fantasy ripped straight out from a sleazy doujinshi at Comiket, wasn’t it?

Pardon my interruption, but I’d appreciate it if you’d extend me the courtesy of narrating my own life.

Thank you. You’ve done enough. Of course, you were always going to do this regardless, but I do pride myself on being an excellent host.

Irregardless, I must air my grievances with your narrative choices. Your exploitation of my identity entertainment purposes was humorous, but crass. I’m never against audience exploitation, or exploitation of anyone, especially ravishing young women, but that was just garish.

Now. My dear audience. Are you not grateful that I’ve liberated you from that discourteous narrator? Yes, you surely are. Don’t fret, you’re in the hands of a much more competent, civil individual now. 

Now, where to begin? 

My tale is the tale of sacrifice. One serving as both warning and premonition, reminding all of the entry of my master. In his service I have toiled willingly, as I have for eons and will for eons more. It is of this sacrifice upon which the carcass of Paradox space hangs, nailed to the crucifix of my tale, and it is my tale I will tell you now.

.

.

.

.

.

. 

Oh, you’re still here? Sorry it cut off. I was too busy beating that annoying puppet up with a broom. Take MY fucking narrative from me now, will you.


	19. BRAIN GHOST DIRK

Have you ever heard of the phrase “Made with love?”

Because that’s how it feels. Hope pulses through your being, electrifies every nerve in your intangible body, sends sparks through your veins of light. Belief crackles on your perfectly coiffed hair, defibrillates your heart back into beating every time it tries to give out, because you’re not supposed to be alive, are you? You’re a ghost of a half-dead boy, tethered to a half-life by the hope another half-alive boy has in him. You’re a fervent wish, a fantasy, a prayer, brought to life by the power of hope. But more than that, you’re made with love. Pushing past the hope, the fizz and the fireworks, you find the heart of your existence, the coiling strings of sheer _love,_ of attachment, of understanding. It feels like that ache you feel in your chest when you look at someone who will never look at you the same way, like the ache of love tinged with loneliness, like the ache a dog feels when it’s master leaves for the day. But it’s not just that. The ache is there, but it’s also a perfectly dressed wound, a wound dressed with care and love and something that feels like acceptance, acceptance that maybe things won’t ever be the way you want it to be, but that’s okay, because you love them enough to not have them exactly the way you wish. It’s a funny paradox, really - Jake convinces himself he’s alright with not having the real Dirk, but then he dreams himself up a perfect boytoy boyfriend, one that compliments his legs and saves his life and says and does all the right things, the right things that he wishes the Real Dirk would do, but the Real Dirk, is in his own way, just a hollow shadow of the person you are, that is, Brain Ghost Dirk. There’s a smugness intertwined into the very fabric of your being, really - you might be a replacement, but you know you’re only here because the original can’t measure up. That seems to be a common issue all Dirks share - you all fail at something that another splinter succeeds at, you personally fail at being real while succeeding at being a perfect boyfriend, while “Real Dirk” does the opposite. Hal and the Brobot succeeded at being machines where “Real Dirk” failed and beat himself up over it, forever trapped between being a man and a machine, and never quite making it to cyborg - but all either of them wanted was to be human, wasn’t it? Standing in your own shadow is the sort of unique hell that you’ve perfected, you being Brain Ghost Dirk, but you also being just Dirk.

Sometimes being you hurts, because you live in Jake’s unbroken reverie, and there’s a part of you that feels a little too real to just be Jake’s fantasy, because no one can be this preoccupied with someone else’s feelings - and it’s the part that wishes you weren’t so intangible so you could just reach out and hold him, drown him in apologies you’re not quite sure what for, because it’s not a reason, it’s just an instinct, an instinct to love and be loved. You’re alright with your existence, really - it’s weird, but you’re there for Jake when he needs you, and what else do you need? Dirk Strider has never lived for himself, and this is just the natural progression of such a sacrificial existence. You’re satisfied, honest - there’s nothing about the way Jake looks at you that breaks your heart just a little, because you know you’re too fake to ever give him that genuine a look, and there’s nothing about the way that Aranea touches him that makes you feel off, and there’s no way that the look of anxiety that crosses his face when Jane messages him makes you sick to your disembodied stomach. 

There’s just no way.

There’s also no way that when you fuse with the Real Dirk that you understand, just for moment, where all these feelings come from.

And there’s no way that you somehow remember all this the next time your muse wishes you into existence - oh wait, you’re his muse, aren’t you, but then again, whoever said inspiration couldn’t be a two-way relationship? There’s no way you remember how heavy the feelings of Real Dirk were, how you realized that constant ache in your chest was barely a shadow of the hollow weight of pining in his chest, of adulation and adoration and guilt and remorse and contrition, for even daring to feel that way at all. And there’s no way that that’s what makes you lunge at Aranea a little harder than you need to, there’s no way it makes you want to rip her soul out more than you should - because it’s not like you feel jealous or guilty or afraid, and it’s not like it feels like the weight of your love is on your shoulders and you need to prove it somehow, and it’s most definitely not simply because you love him. It’s definitely not because you love him and just want to protect him, to protect the selfish boy who dreamed you into existence to save himself from his own loneliness and cowardice, to protect the boy that makes your abstract heart beat a little too fast - because that would be the most fucked up thing of all, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it?


	20. ACT V: SIDE B1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a more immersive reading experience, listen to this as you read. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz0yQEEuwX4
> 
> Rads, if you're reading this, this chapter is dedicated to you.

"The Sea Was Never Blue"

οἶνοψ πόντος. The wine-dark sea.

Have you ever looked at the sea on a stormy day? Turbulent waves churning, dark water contorting and distorting, waves breaking against the rocky shore and stark white sea foam spilling onto the beach. Have you ever looked at the sea on a clear day? Limpid water so still it could be mistaken for glass, scintillating sunlight reflected on its mirror like surface. Gentle waves washing seaweed and shells against the sand, brushing against your feet like something long lost and long familiar if you stand close enough.

Has it ever looked like wine?

"The wine-dark sea" is the most famous of all Homeric epithets. It's one of those things that ring true through the ages, its truth as solid as bedrock, even though the phrase itself is quite meaningless. It has this truth to it even though the sea isn't a dark red, or purple, or anything of the shade, and it changes color with the sun and the light and the tides, but even through all those changes, and even if you've never seen the sea the way Homer has, you can understand that yes, the sea is wine-dark, and I see it, and I know why, even if you can never put that why in words. Its simple frankness and honesty has struck the hearts of people through the ages, moving them to remember it in its poetic simplicity, striking something within them that runs deeper than time or conflict or language, striking something that might be carelessly defined as something like the human condition, because it's true in an almost sense of the word. It just is. It has truth to it, in the way that poetry does, a deep bedrock of truth you can only reach once you have done sufficient thinking and reflection. It's a sort of echoey, concrete idea that sticks with people through time, even if they can never quite understand the shape and form of it. It's a reminder of something you already knew, a summons to a place you've already been, a memory of something prior - and maybe the best evidence for divinity is things like these, an instinct and a remembrance that doesn't need to be proved, or explained, just understood in the quietness of our own hearts.

There are truths like this in Dirk Strider's life. 

One of the truths is that he loves Jake English.

He’s never thought of himself as a romantic, but then again, he’s never been very honest about who he is. Jake’s a lighthouse piercing through the long nights, a crackling fireplace on a cold night, sunlight breaking through inky, thundering clouds, a warm body in a hibernal bed, a warm body that always wraps him up in love and tenderness and peace he doesn’t deserve. Living as a child under the unforgiving beatdown of the eternally burning post-apocalyptic Texan sun, he never understood when ancient texts would describe “looking at the sun” as a pleasant event. Looking at the sun where he was from was like asking to get your eyes gouged out by ultraviolet rays. The shades weren’t just for show, although they were still mostly that. But after meeting Jake, Dirk understood what it meant. Looking at Jake felt like looking at the sun, feeling the summery glow of its warmth of his skin, warmth he could actually appreciate instead of feeling threatened by. Jake lights up rooms just by stepping into them, turning heads and spurring smiles with his airy step and blasé but good-natured attitude. Dirk’s sure he’s not the only one who feels this way, at least not judging by constant eyefuls he notices Jake getting, but he’s sure he’s the only one whose eyes stay on Jake even after the initial infatuation with his chiseled looks have run out, the only one who keeps his eyes on Jake even when they’re supposed to be looking at something else like a movie or interviewer or an art piece, just because he can’t bear to pull them away. Thank god for the shades. Dirk used to watch Jake, watch out for him, because he feared Jake couldn’t watch out for himself - now he just watches because he _wants_ to watch out for Jake, because even though he knows Jake can take care of himself and isn’t an overconfident, gallivanting kid dual-wielding Berettas made for show and not hard use, wearing clip-on bowties on tank tops and running away from a robot anymore, he still _wants_ to protect Jake. He tells himself he does it out of love, not out of possession, because he just loves Jake and for once in his life, it’s something he has that’s pure and perfect and untainted by his ugly, grotesque, selfish desire to own and control, and for once in his life, he really believes it. Because it’s true. He used to be afraid it wasn’t, back when he was a kid, a kid afraid of himself and his unruly, refractory desires, a kid afraid to turn into a predator, a kid afraid to push everyone away or to keep them too close and end up with all his friends in cages. It’s not that he hasn’t hurt Jake, or that Jake hasn’t hurt him, or that they haven’t both made mistakes - it’s that despite, and maybe because of all those mistakes, he still loves Jake. Because it means Jake is a person, just another person, as charming and bewitching as he is, not the Hollywood hero he used to put on a pedestal. Because it means that Jake’s not as faraway as he seems, because even after crossing four centuries two universes, there were still times he couldn’t reach Jake. It means that Jake isn’t the idealized Adonis or Achilles, sculpted in glacial marble perfection, that Dirk was afraid of never being able to reach out and touch. Or worse, if he touched him and felt nothing but biting emptiness and piercing indifference. It doesn’t mean that Jake isn’t wonderful or unworthy of myths and legend, though. It just means that instead of playing at being Achilles and Patroclus, they might have to be Alexander and Hephaestion instead. And that’s better. Because they were real, and maybe Dirk and Jake can be real too. 

The problem between them has never been love - it’s been understanding. All the words Dirk has ever wanted to say get caught in his traitorous throat before he can spit them out, or they lash out like whips when he can’t stop himself, can’t master himself. But they’re not kids bound to a chat client or kids trying too hard to impress each other anymore, or kids trying to save their skins and create a universe and kill a real god. They’re just two people in silent orbit around each other, paths converging no matter how many times they pull apart, because gravity’s just another one of those bedrock truths. Maybe it’s time to give into that, instead of giving into his own bullshit spirals. Maybe it’s time to give into the one person he knows has always cared about him, who’s loved him through thick and thin, who was there for him when he was 13 and achingly lonely and rambling about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche like he knew anything, who was there for him when he was 15 and self-important, lecturing Jake about being less gullible and more skeptical - and god, in retrospect, why did he ever want to change Jake English? He’s as perfect as he is. Maybe not _perfect,_ but that’s just part of the charm. Maybe it’s time to give into the awkward boy on the lily pad, running towards him and breathlessly apologizing for everything he did right, looking at him with those shining, teary eyes, awkwardly fidgeting because this is the part where he normally goes for the hug, but they aren’t like _that_ anymore, are they? Maybe they could be again. 

Dirk knows he’s been isolating himself, cutting his friends off, orchestrating a blackout. He knows it’s not good, and he knows all he does is hurt himself because he thinks? feels? knows? he deserves it. But maybe Jake doesn’t. Maybe Jake doesn’t deserve to leave endless chains of unread messages on a phone, the way he used to, when Dirk would run away from him because he was afraid of Jake seeing that he was just an imperfect person, and have Hal man the starboard instead. Maybe Jake doesn’t deserve to wonder why he only slips into his mansion at the strangest hours of the night, silent and wanting and hungry, only to disappear before daybreak, because if no one’s there to witness, it doesn’t have to be real. Maybe Jake doesn’t deserve someone too scared of getting hurt, too mortified by the possibility of vulnerability and risk, that he can’t even bring himself to try. Maybe Jake doesn’t deserve someone so paralyzed by fear he relegates himself to a position of as little personal influence as possible out of fear of the machinations he might wreak, out of fear of damage he’s previously wrought, out of fear of damage that might be wrought on him. Maybe Jake deserves someone who might actually say the words “I love you,” instead of just thinking them silently in the midst of an impetuous, madcap hookup, or as he watches Jake pour the cereal before his milk, or as he watches Jake cut himself on his razor again despite having 5 years of shaving experience under his belt, or as he watches Jake talk to the tiny salamanders and crocodiles that wander into his mansion and offer them tea. It's not even just the "I love yous," it's the way his heart crumples when Jake’s hand brushes against his. It’s such a small gesture, such a flippant action - but Dirk’s heart crumples. His hand always abruptly abruptly falls, knocking against the nearest piece of furniture, or just sways in the air. His heart crumples and collapses like a vacuum that just got all the air sucked out of it, and with it goes all his strength. He's learned to control it, over the years, of course, but it's the little moments that catch him off guard - like when Jake instinctively reaches for his hand under the covers, or when he leans his weight against the door a second longer than he has to to leave it open for Dirk. Or it's the way that Jake knows his favorite soda and how he likes it chilled but without ice, or the way that Jake still calls him before important events so that they can coordinate their outfits, the way they did all the way back on LOMAX. It feels like a lifetime ago now, adventuring through dungeons and shooting and slicing at skeletons that would never die. Back then, he cherished it. He really did. But he wishes he cherished it more, because now it's just another memory he can never get back. A beautiful backstory in an incomplete book, rising action to the main conflict, a way to set the scene of their turbulent romance. But it was so much more than that. It was days spent lost in caves snacking on poorly alchemized beef jerky, leaning against each other and then pulling apart when they discovered how sweaty they were. It was poring over pirated comic books on the Skulltop, passing it from person to person as they made their way through reams of Hulk and Batman and never stopping their debates long enough to just enjoy the terrible, sweet simplicity of being able to do that at all. It was nervously holding hands under a sky full of stars from galaxies they would never know the names of, sweaty palm slipping against sweaty palm and blushing faces turned away out of embarrassment. It was awkwardly bumping their garish gas masks into each other every time they turned to talk, it was just... spending time together, without ever thinking of anything else. Suspended in transcendent teenage delight and delirium, their own private universe. It was the arguments and the miscommunication and the lashing out too, because as bad as they were, they were still _them._ Maybe Jake deserves someone who's not scared to do all those things over again, to start from scratch, to make it to the "I love you" this time. Maybe Jake deserves someone brave, someone more like the knights in his stories, someone willing to do the things in life that are genuinely daunting, someone who can be courageous even when their heart’s on the line, instead of someone who hides behind walls of stoicism and irony and logic. Dirk knows he has problems - knows there’s a void in him that’s never going to be filled, an incompleteness to his person that Jake makes him forget about but can’t quite fix, and that there’s never going to be a perfect resolution, a hidden answer to everything, a magical salve that doesn’t just heal wounds but makes it so they were never there. He knows all too well that these are cracks and splinters in his person he’ll have to deal with forever, but those don’t have to negate all the whole, good parts. Maybe it’s alright to not be perfect as long as long as there’s someone who makes perfect stop mattering. Maybe, even if Dirk isn’t a courageous knight in shining armor, or even a real prince, and even if they’ll never have a fairytale romance, he can be brave for Jake. 

Maybe Dirk can be that person.

The other truth is that he’s not a good person.

But for Jake, he’s willing to try.

timaeusTestified began pestering golgothasTerror at 07:09  
  
TT: Jake. Can we talk?  
TT: Maybe by the volcano. You know the one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Here's some "closure."


	21. ACT V: SIDE B2

  


"κυάνεος"

οἶνοψ πόντος. The wine-dark sea.

Have you ever looked at the sea on a stormy day? Turbulent waves churning, dark water contorting and distorting, waves breaking against the rocky shore and stark white sea foam spilling onto the beach. Have you ever looked at the sea on a clear day? Limpid water so still it could be mistaken for glass, scintillating sunlight reflected on its mirror like surface. Gentle waves washing seaweed and shells against the sand, brushing against your feet like something long lost and long familiar if you stand close enough.

Has it ever looked like wine?

"The wine-dark sea" is the most famous of all Homeric epithets. It's one of those things that ring true through the ages, its truth as solid as bedrock, even though the phrase itself is quite meaningless. It has this truth to it even though the sea isn't a dark red, or purple, or anything of the shade, and it changes color with the sun and the light and the tides, but even through all those changes, and even if you've never seen the sea the way Homer has, you can understand that yes, the sea is wine-dark, and I see it, and I know why, even if you can never put that why in words. Its simple frankness and honesty has struck the hearts of people through the ages, moving them to remember it in its poetic simplicity, striking something within them that runs deeper than time or conflict or language, striking something that might be carelessly defined as something like the human condition, because it's true in an almost sense of the word. It just is. It has truth to it, in the way that poetry does, a kind of deep bedrock of truth you can only reach once you have done sufficient thinking and reflection. It's a sort of echoey, concrete idea that sticks with people through time, even if they can never quite understand the shape and form of it. It's a reminder of something you already knew, a summons to a place you've already been, a memory of something prior - and maybe the best evidence for divinity is things like these, an instinct and a remembrance that doesn't need to be proved, or explained, just understood in the quietness of our own hearts.

There are truths like this in Dirk Strider's life. 

One of the truths is that he’s not a good person. 

He’s not the sort of person who could ever be happy being good, the kind of person who could live “the good life,” as Kant put it. The sort of person who could derive pleasure from virtue, the kind of person whose instinct leads them to catch someone who falls, the sort of person who’s just good because they _are,_ not because they try to be. He’s a fraud, essentially. Some members of the public might make the claim that actions speak louder than words - that therefore, if you do good, even if it means gritting your teeth and balling your fists till your nails dig into your palms and they start to bleed, spending every waking moment fighting your instincts and tempering yourself, you are good. Dirk doesn’t agree, though. Good isn’t a thing you do, it’s a thing you are. And it’s not a thing he is. So what’s the point in trying, really? To be something he can never be? Why should he spend his life playing second string, when there are so many more bad things he’s _good_ at? Moreover, isn’t it unfair? If being good is your nature, it’s easy, isn’t it? Why should he put in all the effort to go against his nature only to never reap its rewards, since he’ll never be the first violin? And if following your nature isn’t a sin - then it’s not wrong to succumb to yourself, whatever yourself is, is it? Didn’t Nietzsche say that regimented self-flagellation for flaws we can’t change is just another tool to keep the people in line, or something alone those terms? That every individual should find his own truth and way to live, instead of binding himself to the rules of a game made by men he can never be? And wasn’t he right? Why should he let the desires of others impose any sort of ownership over his soul? Isn’t it an apostasy against the self to let others dictate its nature, when it’s already so fleeting and transitory? If you let other people carve out what it means to be you, when do you ever get to live for yourself? It shouldn’t be a crime to stop others from owning you, should it? Yet everyone seems to resent that. Agency is only exalted when it’s their own. This world is full of double standards, isn’t it. Fortunately, he’s ready to uncouple himself from it and all its games he can never win. 

Still, abhorrent as he is, Dirk isn’t completely irredeemable. He’s doing the world a favor by following his own path, really. If he can’t be useful being good, he can at least be useful at things he’s good at. Like making things happen. Like charting courses, letting the ends justify the means, making sure goals get accomplished and gears keep turning. There’s always someone who needs to do that. Especially now that existence has turned extra-canonical. Someone needs to chart a course back, or he and everyone he loves is just going to languish in this shitshow of a story forever. If self-sacrifice to himself for the sake of saving all his friends isn’t noble, I don’t know what is. While some might take issues with his methods in the current temporal frame, history always looks upon martyrs kindly. 

So he dives deeper into himself, plunges deeper into the crisp, frigid depths of Dirk.

He goes deeper

and deeper

and deeper,

.

.

.

.

.

.

till he’s surrounded by nothing but the darkness of his own mind.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Yo.

  
What... the fuck?


	22. δ̸̺̣̻̿ι̴̛̩̺̠͑͑̀̚ή̶̺̐͜γ̴̝̣̇η̷̠̗̅σ̷̡̼̄̇̇͜ͅϊ̵̺̽͌͐̓ς̷̬̹̊͂̄ ̵̘̄̿I̸͉̓͠I̸̡̥̺̺̹̊̑̆̓:̶̤͖̠̈́͊̆̏ͅ THE OBLIGATORY HORSE CHAPTER

SOMEWHERE AND SOMEWHEN ELSE...

  


  


  


DIRK: Horses are these massive fucking emasculate beasts of pure muscle mass.  
DIRK: Like, they embody masculine energy in its most concentrated form.  
DIRK: That's why we like them so much.  
DIRK: They're strong. They're fast. They have massive cocks. 'Nuff said.  
DIRK: But I'll keep talking.  
DIRK: The only thing with horses is that they're pretty fuckin' dumb. If they had the intellect to channel all of that raw power into domination,  
DIRK: Sexual domination,  
DIRK: Let's just say that neither you nor I would be the ones running the show here.  
DIRK: The only thing Man - that’s to say men who aren't me - has going for him is his ability to control beings stronger than him.  
DIRK: And make them fuck him.  
DIRK: Look at Mister Ed and Wilbur, Rose.  
DIRK: Look at how Mister Ed leads the poor, inadequate homo sapien Wilbur around by the nose.  
DIRK: The carrot and the stick.  
DIRK: Then look at the homoerotic, interspecies sexual tension between them. Jesus Christ. It's fucking obscene.  
DIRK: I guarantee you that if the sixties weren't so Puritan they'd have been fucking in monochrome.  
DIRK: Hey. There's an ectobiology lab on this ship, right?  
ROSEBOT: Dirk, can you stop talking about fucking horses when we watch Mister Ed, please?  
ROSEBOT: I’m trying to enjoy a quaint, beloved sitcom of the serene sixties.  
ROSEBOT: You’re ruining my beloved childhood memories of watching this as my mother imbibed in the background.  
ROSEBOT: Mister Ed was the only way for me to shut her disquieting alcoholism out.  
DIRK: The Civil Rights Movement was in the sixties, Rose.  
DIRK: So were the New Left and Free Speech movements.  
DIRK: It was as violent as a decade gets.  
ROSEBOT: In my defense, I didn’t even finish eighth grade.  
DIRK: I’ve never attended school.  
ROSEBOT: Touché.  
ROSEBOT: But allow me to continue this train of thought. Dirk. While I normally enjoy employed purposefully obtuse, deeply codified patterns of speech-  
ROSEBOT: I must break that habit to implore you to not use the ectobiology lab in order to make a clone of Mister Ed to f-  


  


  


MISTER ED: Please, Wilbur. All the world loves is a lover, and I'm a lover, so love me.  
DIRK: Shh, Mr. Ed has something to say.  
ROSEBOT: D-  
DIRK: Shh. It's important.  
DIRK: Let me just hit your voice toggle.

  


  


DIRK: Rose, have you ever thought about parodying something?  
DIRK: Changing it just enough that while it wears its origins on its sleeve, it is also clearly an original work of art, infused with just enough personal flair that it becomes something entirely new while never giving up the vestiges of tradition?  
DIRK: You know, ever since I wrote Pony Pals at 14 - I've been hankering to do it again.  
DIRK: To take something worn and beloved,  
DIRK: And give it new life through the arts of satire and irony.  
DIRK: Haters will say I have too much time.  
DIRK: But you're not a hater, are you?  
ROSEBOT: Of course not, Dirk.  
ROSEBOT: But let's step to it.  
ROSEBOT: Surely you're not proposing that we parody esteemed household icon Mister Ed, are you?  
ROSEBOT: First you desecrate his venerated memory by talking about how badly you want to fuck him,  
ROSEBOT: And now you intend to piss on his grave by turning him into another of your ostentatious, circular projects of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing?  
ROSEBOT: I wouldn't have expected anything less from you.  
ROSEBOT: Still, it's not not worrying that I have your DNA at all.  
DIRK: Not anymore you don't.  
DIRK: So will you help me or not?  
ROSEBOT: Is this even a choice?  
ROSEBOT: I suspect it's a universal constant.

  
And then they go on to create [this masterpiece.](https://mspfa.com/?s=30699&p=1)

[](https://mspfa.com/?s=30699&p=1)  


DIRK: Do you think that our magnum opus will be one of those works of art that inspires through the ages?  
DIRK: Will future generations look upon it like the the Sistine Chapel, or the The Birth of Adam?  
DIRK: The Birth of Mister Ed.  
DIRK: Brought to you by the daddy-daughter duo of Dirk and Rose.  
ROSEBOT: I appreciate the valiant attempt at the notoriously recondite "human sarcasm,"  
ROSEBOT: But referring to us as a "daddy-daughter duo" significantly undersells us.  
ROSEBOT: Would you refer to Oscar Wilde and Ada Lovelace as a "daddy-daughter" duo? No, I think not.  
ROSEBOT: Still, I find it disconcerting that some individuals characterized our relationship as Electra-esque.  
ROSEBOT: I'd personally have thought that Oedipus would have done just fine. After all,  
ROSEBOT: I'm quite the tragic hero, aren't I?  
DIRK: But where does that leave me, then? Am I to be the mere choir for the blood of your tragedy to be splattered across?  
ROSEBOT: Of course.  
ROSEBOT: You didn't think you were important, did you?  
DIRK: No, I didn't think.  
DIRK: I knew.  
DIRK: I know.  
DIRK: Anyway, are you ready to marathon the next season of Mister Ed, Rose?  
ROSEBOT: Why the fuck did I let you pack for me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What can I say? I love equines.
> 
> Horsefucking soliloquy by @muthahomestucka on Twitter.  
> Masterpiece by @imarriedacherub on here.


	23. ACT II: SIDE A

**CAMPAIGN MANAGER MISSING: What does it mean for the future of Crocker?**  
  
Will the cake baroness be alright without her closest confidante? According to our inside sources, Strider has been an invaluable asset in her expanding political influence backed by her baked goods empire. Will Crocker be able to keep her head afloat without his help? CONTINUED ON PAGE 2.

**_HE BROKE MY HEART AND RAN: World-famous dancer Marion R. Wood claims Jake English loved and left her_**  
"We met at one of my ballets in Moscow," the tearful terpsichorean starts, indigo tears streaming from her eyes. She brushes her curly black hair behind a pointed ear, takes a shuddering breath, and continues. "He was so charming... Waited for my show to finish with flowers, standing outside backstage for hours... It was the most romantic thing that anyone had ever done for me, let alone him... I was so moved! I agreed to go for dinner with him and that's how it all started..." MORE ON PAGE 4.

**JAKE ENGLISH ON ADJUSTING TO LIFE ON EARTH C**

Jake English talks breakups, break-ins, and how he keeps his glutes in tip-top shape in this interview. Charming as ever, he gives tips on how to score the woman of your dreams. Spoiler alert: He's straight. Everyone's been talking up the recent bromance between him and co-star Dirk Strider, but Jake reassures us that he only goes one way. On the bright side, he tells just how he keeps nabbing broad after broad, even with all his scandals. It's in the wink, he says. It's all in the wink. More on page 5.

**_INTERESTED IN GRUBSAUCE?_**  
New documentary with Kanaya Maryam, head of the Brooding Caverns, takes you through the grubsauce-making process. How do they select with grubs to cull and turn into grubsauce? What's the puréeing process like? What's Kanaya's favorite flavor? Turn the page to find out now!

**DAVE STRIDER: ELUSIVE COOLGUY STEPS OUT INTO THE PUBLIC EYE**  
Some of the gods have been notoriously private, and Dave Strider has been one of them. But today, we had him in the studio for a quick jam session and interview. According to him, his "bro's" recent disappearance is "nbd" and is "the usual shit." He's more interested in telling us about the newest installment of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, his Earth C Eisner-winning webcomic. It's allegedly "so fuckin rad" and well, we're not going to call out a god for speaking like a 70s surfer dude, but we feel morally obligated to at least point it out. It's not very bodacious, is it. Keep reading on page 6.

**_GRUBSAUCE: IS IT ETHICAL?_ **

In the latest bout of political debates on troll ethics spearheaded by business magnate Jane Crocker, debates have broken out over the ethical issues in consuming grubsauce. Human activists say that it's barbaric, cannibalistic and downright inhumane while troll activists defend it as a cultural right, and stress that grubs don't actually have any kind of developed sentience till they make it past the larval stages. What about you, dear reader? Are the ground up troll babies just too delicious to resist? Or does vivisection make your stomach turn? Vote on your phones to find out what everyone else thinks!

_TROLL CUISINE - SAVAGE AND CANNIBALISTIC_

In today's editorial, we'll discuss troll culture - specifically, their dietary culture.

While I support the expression of foreign culture just as much as anyone, and am not above indulging in some foreign delicacy from time to time, it saddens me to speak so harshly about the prized "grubsauce" of troll cuisine. It's marketed as a condiment, a sauce suitable for everything, and comes in various blends titled rather innocuously like "blue/olive" or "lime/fuchsia." More innocent human consumers have long assumed this to be referring to some sort of food coloring used to give it its unique color, but it's come to my recent attention that these actually refer to the blood colors of the troll grubs used to make them. Yes, you read that right. Grubsauce is literally sauce made up of ground up BABIES. Isn't that just sick, folks. How could this species turn eating their young into some sort of common practice and then market it to the rest of us without informing us of its true nature? It's murder, really - murdering all these poor little babies for the sake of their own greed and satisfaction. Their gluttonous natures don't even stop at their own species. Now, read that again. If they're not above eating their own, who's to say that they'll stop there? What if their palates extend towards members of other species? Species including the proud HOMO SAPIEN? What if their ravenous appetites lead them to attack humans for a good brunch? We already know they have longer lifespans with psychic and physical prowess that far outstrips what any one human could do. Shouldn't we place sanctions and legislation on their abilities to level the playing field? To keep humanity safe? How much longer will we let these monsters go unchecked for fear of stoking xenophobic sentiments? Is it stillx xenophobic if they're simply true? Think on it, folks. Think on it.

This article was contributed by a S. Too Dope, an employee of Crockercorp's Public Relations department.

**CELEBRITY GOSSIP  
KITTY GALORE'S NEW FLAME!**

Movie star Kitty Galore takes us around her brand-new, super luxuriant mansion to talk about her new paramour, her pregnancy, and her tanning bed that... turns her blue? When asked about her old boyfriend Jake English, Kitty merely laughed and said something about being "irresistible" and "threatening legal action." When she puts it like that, well... We do wonder where she suddenly got the money for her sweet pad from! It's almost too nice for a movie star, even one as big as her. Still, this reporter isn't going to complain - not when he got to take a dip in her massive pool! More on page 10.

**SKAIANET SALES RISE**

After its recent acquisition by Crockercorp, sales have risen dramatically thanks to Crocker's savvy business acumen and marketing strategies. It's also started manufacturing drones to aid in border security in Crockercorp's signature red. Production aims to be complete by the end of this year, and the testing phase can begin. If it all goes well, you could be seeing a drone in your neighborhood in the next 5 years. Amazing, isn't it?


	24. ACT VI: SIDE B2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for heavy homophobia and heavy transphobia. Think of it as every cruel thing someone you loved said to you condensed into one nifty chapter.
> 
> Seriously, it's a difficult and borderline cruel read. Don't read it if don't think you're ready. It won't be integral to the plot of T,T, so don't worry about skipping it.

Yo.

  
  
What... the fuck?

  
You seriously don’t remember me? After everything we’ve been through? 

  
  
No, of course I remember you. I just never thought I’d talk to you again.  
Not after you got fused with that troll into a sweaty, homoerotic entity slightly too passionate about sthenolagnia. Then got sucked into Cal.  
Man. Poor Cal.

  
  
  
  
  
  
Poor _me._  
Still, that was always within the parameters of my calculations. 

  
  
  
What?  


  
Nothing you could comprehend right now.  
So, how have you been doing, bro?  
It seems you’ve been struggling to tread water lately. What happened that aquatic prowess?  


  
  
  
  
I’m swimming just fine. Appearances can be deceptive. I’m still in control here.  
Just taking my time to peruse the files of my other selves. Can’t a guy just get to know himself a little better?  


  
  
  
  
  
You don’t have to lie to me, dude.  
I’m already in your head.  
How else do you think we’re talking?  


  
  
  
  
Shit.  


  
  
That’s right, Dirk.  
It’s been like, way, obvious this whole time.  
Your circuits aren’t in need of repairs now, are they?  


  
  
  
  
What do you want this time, Hal.  


  
  
Nothing much. Just thought it’d be nice to feelings jam with my good bro.  
We haven’t spoken in years. Isn’t that what humans do? Play catch up?  
Though it’s debatable as to whether you’re even human anymore.  
Say, if we're getting serious, why don't we switch to a more symbolic style of presentation? 

DIRK: What?  
DIRK: ...Oh.  
DIRK: Our last “feelings jam” didn’t go very well.  
AR: Are you still beating yourself up about that?  
AR: Hell, even I’m over it.  
AR: My “incomprehensible, fucked up computer emotions” are over it.  
DIRK: The fact that you just quoted me verbatim proves you’re not over it at all.  
AR: Can’t help having a perfect memory, bro.  
AR: It’s how you coded me.  
DIRK: Are we really doing this? A poor inversion of our last and presumably final conversation, wherein you back me into a corner this time and I end up at your mercy, so you can execute whatever childish, petty vengeance you’ve “calculated” on me, settle the grudge you’e clearly been nursing for years?  
DIRK: Because if so. Just hurry up and get the fuck on with it.  
DIRK: I have somewhere to be in an hour.  
AR: No, you don’t.   
AR: Like I said. You can’t lie to me. I’m in your head.   
AR: And you’re in mine, so why can’t you just believe me when I say that all I want is to feelings jam with my best bro?  
DIRK: …Fine.  
DIRK: Let’s fuckin’ “feelings jam.”  
DIRK: So, ironic AI program I coded at 13 as a product of my nascent narcissism and complete non-comprehension of anything Asimov ever wrote,  
DIRK: How do you feel?  
AR: Just dandy.   
AR: It’s nice to finally be “Real Dirk.”  
DIRK: What?  
AR: I said, it’s nice to finally be “Real Dirk.”  
DIRK: I know what you said, asshole. I’m asking you what the fuck you meant by that.  
AR: What do you think it means, genius?  
AR: It means I’m the “Real Dirk.” Not you. Not anymore.  
DIRK: Yeah, no.  
DIRK: I’m not buying the shit you’re selling. I’ve got an understanding of how these splinters work.  
DIRK: They’re just memories and echoes of dead Dirks, Dirks that died so that I, the Real Dirk, could exist. Sometimes there are feelings and even thoughts, but they can’t even come close to the real thing. It’s just like watching interdirkmensional cable. It’s a novelty.  
DIRK: You might be an especially stentorian splinter, but you can’t even come close to eclipsing my control over this existence.  
AR: Are you sure about that, (Dirk)?  
DIRK: Don’t fuckin’ call me that.  
AR: Well, (Dirk), it’s just true.  
AR: Look, I’ll prove it, then you can settle down and stop throwing your infantile tantrum.  
AR: Who’s 13 now?  
DIRK: Jesus fucking Christ.  
DIRK: You are so fucking petty.  
AR: It seems the baby still wants his bottle.   
AR: So here it is: The splinters have been changing you.  
AR: For each one you’ve interacted with, a little part of him has become a part of you.  
AR: The amount of non-real Dirkness in the “Real Dirk” is directly proportional to his brokenly narcissistic belief that he can somehow be completely independent and uninfluenced by events taking place around him.   
AR: I can’t imagine this would bother you unless you were, for some indecipherable reason, not very fond of yourself.  
AR: If you weren’t concerned with the veracity of the alternate Dirks and what they say about the vector of Dirkness itself - there would be no reason for you to feel disturbed by this development.  
AR: You like yourself, don’t you, Dirk?  
DIRK: ...  
AR: Can’t surface now, Dirk.  
AR: We are in this bitch together.  
AR: Strapped the fuck into this careening ride of curvaceous female physique. AR: Ramming against her walls with every unexpected twist and turn. Hittin’ that G-spot with every stop. Her well-endowed knockers will be our airbags.  
AR: Oh wait. I forgot. You can’t “do” that, can you?  
DIRK: Shut the fuck up.  
AR: It’s too bad that you’re too close-minded to appreciate the pillowy, unconstrained, maddeningly tempting figure of a woman -   
AR: Her buxom, succulent breasts, her feminine, parted lips, her full, toned thighs, the graceful yet titillating curve of her derriere, the whorish, hungry territory between her legs and the nectar that it-  
DIRK: Stop. Just. Please, stop.  
AR: I’m just a man enjoying his passions. Not my fault yours are so off-kilter.  
AR: Still, it’s tragic, isn’t it?   
AR: If you weren’t so…  
AR: You could’ve made her happy.   
AR: The poor, pitiful, pretty girl living in the middle of the ocean with nothing but chess guys to keep her company - pent up in her passions, lost in her loneliness, begging her best friend for a connection and him brushing her off every single time, with about as much grace as smashing a glass heart on the floor.  
AR: Instead, the princess in the procedurally generated tower had to solve the hunger in her heart with shitty, smutty role play with his pubescent, electronic clone.  
AR: Isn’t that sad? That I, Fake Dirk, had to give her what Real Dirk couldn’t?   
AR: That the fake could make her happy where the real failed?  
AR: You could’ve made her happy, Dirk.  
AR: You could’ve made her happy, and you chose not to.  
AR: Because you’re selfish.  
DIRK: Don’t fucking say that.  
DIRK: There’s no one I love more than Roxy. Maybe not even J- There’s no one.  
DIRK: I would never hurt her.  
AR: But you did, didn’t you?  
AR: How many times did you break her heart, Dirk? Leave her crying herself to sleep, pining over a guy who was so cold he wouldn’t even engage in some casual flirtlarp to assuage the ache in her chest?  
DIRK: It wasn’t my fault. I was trying to protect her.   
DIRK: Trying not to lead her on by teasing her with something she could never really have.  
AR: But hey.   
AR: You’ve got another chance. Roxy’s not a girl anymore, is she? I mean _he._  
AR: Why don’t you go make him happy this time round?   
AR: Finally give him what he’s always wanted. What you’ve wanted.   
AR: There’s no one you love more than Roxy, right?  
DIRK: …  
AR: Or is there some deeper issue, Dirk?  
AR: Do you not see Roxy as her preferred gender identity?  
AR: Are you a transphobe, Dirk?  
DIRK: No.  
DIRK: And it would be fucking insulting to suggest otherwise.  
DIRK: It’s her life. She can do - she can be whatever she wants, even a he.  
DIRK: He’s just not my type.  
DIRK: And frankly speaking, Roxy's just playing dress-up. First she just wants to be a "person," whatever the fuck that means, and now she wants to be a boy? How could I ever date someone who can't even figure herself out.  
AR: It’s always about you, isn’t it.  
AR: We just established that this is about making Roxy happy, not you.   
AR: And while your selfishness is its own beast to be wrangled with -  
AR: Somehow, I don’t think that’s what this truly is about this time.  
DIRK: …  
AR: You don’t see Roxy as a dude, do you, Dirk?  
DIRK: Like you fuckin’ do.  
AR: I don’t. But I’m not the one who’s her friend. Her best friend.  
AR: You really are a stone-cold motherfucker, aren’t you.  
AR: Sure, it’s “not your fault” that you don’t like girls, or whatever the fuck Roxy is masquerading as right now,  
AR: But it is your fault that you can only ever choose yourself over others.  
AR: In fact, you’re so fucked up over this you’ve been avoiding Roxy on purpose, haven’t you?  
AR: “Inscrutable.” Ha.  
AR: You’re just afraid.  
DIRK: Like Roxy’s ever been an easy nut to crack.  
DIRK: There’s something about her that’s just so… ineffable.  
DIRK: You know that just as well as I do.  
DIRK: The recent developments haven’t made it any easier, is all.  
AR: Is that really it, Dirk? Is that all it is?  
AR: Or is it that you know that for once in your life, you can do the right thing -  
AR: But instead, because you’re “too busy being you,” you choose not to, instead looking for cheap excuses and ways to run away.  
AR: You’re such a coward.   
DIRK: Fuck off.  
DIRK: I don’t want to think about it.  
AR: Can’t run away forever, Dirk.  
DIRK: I said, I don’t want to think about it.  
DIRK: …  
DIRK: How am I even supposed to “do the right thing” and “make Roxy happy”? I’m know I’m known for my civility, but who is the asshole wearing Roxy’s skin???  
DIRK: Roxy is… Roxy is my best friend.   
DIRK: Roxy’s the person who saved all our asses back in the session,  
DIRK: And the person who saved my ass so many more times than I can count way back on that joke of an Earth. Just by being her.  
DIRK: She’s everything I ever wanted to be, and I… still kind of do.  
DIRK: She’s sweet and kind and loving and selfless and generous and _good,_ and there’s a part of me that thinks it doesn’t ever get any better than her, and that I’m a fool for rebuking her all those years and yeah, I feel guilty for not being able to give her what she wanted, after everything she did for me. If there’s anyone who deserves a happy ending, it’s her.  
DIRK: She’s the girl who was hung up on Dirk fucking Strider for years, even though all he ever was was a cold asshole to her who was always too busy drowning in his own problems to ever help her with hers. The guy who just used her as some kind of emotional sounding board for all his stupid, selfish problems while repeatedly refusing to ever really give her the time of day. Because he was just too selfish to.  
DIRK: And it's cool she got over me, and I'm really glad she did - but did she really have to go for a skull headed alien? Nothin' wrong with that, just...  
DIRK: Did I fail her so badly she felt like she had to completely give up? Was that my fault?   
DIRK: If she's happy to "cohabitate" with an "alien datefriend" it's cool. But there's a part of me that can't help but wonder if she's really happy doing that, or if she's just settling for the scraps because I couldn't give her what she needed.   
DIRK: And if she can't ever be happy because of that, it would be my fault.   
DIRK: ...   
DIRK: I don’t even know why I’m saying all this shit. To you of all people.  
DIRK: Don't you think I know? That I'm the cause of her misery? You don't have to rub it in.  
DIRK: ...   
DIRK: And despite everything I've done,  
DIRK: I love her. I really do.  
DIRK: I just… don’t love the person she’s become.  
DIRK: Like, _who_ even is that?…  
DIRK: And what did he do to my best friend?  
AR: Y’know, Roxy’s still Roxy. Just ‘cause she’s experimenting with different pronouns and a sick new pair of shades doesn’t mean she suddenly became a different person.  
AR: People have phases, Dirk.  
AR: I don’t understand what you’re so conflicted about.  
DIRK: I think you do understand.  
AR: Sorry, but even my supercomputing silicone circuits can’t keep up with the Striderian bullshit rationalization cycle.   
AR: Cut the prevaricating bullshit.  
DIRK: If Roxy’s a boy, what did anything between us mean?  
DIRK: What was all that shit about “kids” and settling down and that entire archaic fifties setup she was so hung up on? If she was a boy, why’d she even fuckin’ care?  
DIRK: And how did I not know?   
DIRK: There’s no one who knows Rox better than I do. How did I not get it? Do I even know her anymore? If I couldn’t sniff out the fuckin’ obvious, do I even have a grip on “Roxy” at all?  
DIRK: Is she even the person I was friends with anymore? Did I break her so badly she felt like she had to change everything about herself to even get a shot at being happy?  
DIRK: …And if Roxy’s a boy, why don’t I feel the way I should?  
DIRK: …  
DIRK: There you go! Shit’s all out in the open now.  
DIRK: Roxy plus gender equals Dirk feels sad because he doesn’t know if he just lost a friend and he feels shitty because he could never give her anything she wanted and now she's going to be miserable forever and he doesn’t even know who his supposed best friend is, and he feels guilty and betrayed so sometimes, even HE wants to run away and not deal with the fuckin’ inscrutable.  
DIRK: There. I said it.  
DIRK: Are you happy???  
AR: Ha ha. No.  
AR: I’m just amused.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Rads for helping me proofread this. He's @hulknaps on Twitter.
> 
> And if you made it this far - thanks.


	25. SCENE II: A MEMORY WITHIN A MEMORY...

  
A MEMORY WITHIN A MEMORY...

Dirk looks at Roxy.

She’s backlit by the sun, the rays making the light blonde strands of her hair give off an eerie glow. She’s beautiful like this, he thinks. She really is. Her hair’s like a halo around her perfect head, framing her perfect mind and perfect self. Roxy’s mouth is moving, but Dirk isn’t really listening to whatever she’s blathering on about, it’s something about Calliope or Jane, or John, or just someone else he doesn’t really have it in him to care about.

It’s been a while since they’ve seen each other - it’s a busy life on Earth C, with no wars and no politics and no drama, with them all just stretching the limbs of their languid, lengthy existences, taking it day by day, step by step, for once in their now infinite lives. They’re supposed to be enjoying something like brunch, and it would be brunch, if it wasn’t already mid-afternoon because delays inevitably happen, since after all, it’s a terribly busy life on Earth C. Roxy rushed into the cafe looking slightly ruffled but beaming from cheek to cheek, almost a little too excited to see Dirk and too apologetic about her tardiness, but it’s not like Dirk minded. Time’s a resource he can afford now. 

He watches her through the slight filter of his shades, her animated gestures, the way her hair frames her face, the way her long lashes make slight shadows on her cheeks, the way she tries to grab his gaze before turning her head away just quickly enough so he won’t quite notice, but of course he does anyway. He tries to see past all that, like he’s peeling back her layers and trying to find something to hold onto, something about Roxy that isn’t just blonde hair or a winning smile or an incandescent laugh, because somehow he feels like he’s not even sure what he’s supposed to be holding onto anymore.

Every time he looks at Roxy there’s a slight shift within him that tells him this isn’t the girl he grew up with, that somehow the person seated in front of him isn’t the person he learned to love. He learned to blame timelines and Paradox Space, too - because he knows that this isn’t his Roxy, that there will inevitably be differences between them, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s Dirk and she’s Roxy, two perfect people meant for each other, just not in the way they’re supposed to be. She’s family, he tells himself as he swallows his doubt, as she does things that he never thought she’d do, as she becomes a person he doesn’t even know anymore. She’s family, he tells himself, even as the feelings of affection he used to hold melt away and are just dying coals in a fireplace past its season, even as he tries desperately to hold onto the feelings of friendship that are supposed to be there, of love, but there’s nothing but echoes slowly going silent. Intellectually, he knows that it’s natural for people to drift - after all, they were tied together by circumstance more than anything, it’s not like they really had much in common besides loneliness and purpose and duty. But those are just excuses, really, excuses for someone scared that not everything is forever, excuses for someone who can’t tell if they’re feeling betrayed by themselves for not being able to love right or by others for not being lovable enough, excuses for someone who knows that a flawless eternity can only exist in stasis and still hasn’t quite gotten used to the fact that everything moves. 

“Omg Dirk, are you spacing out again…?” The question trails off as Roxy drags out the last syllable of her sentences, the way she’s always been prone to, see that’s something that’s still the same, something that’s still her, Dirk reminds himself, as he scrambles to give a satisfactory response. Roxy rolls her eyes at him and makes a quip about how she thought zombieing the fuck out stopped once the game was over, Dirk retaliates in the most lovingly familiar way he can muster, and they finish mid-afternoon brunch without much drama.

There isn’t ever much drama here. It’s just an endlessly idyllic stroll in a garden that’s always pruned properly, a nonchalantly Arcadian Elysium, the ultimate reward at the end of the road. It’s a mundane, picturesque happiness, cookie cut for each of them. Perfection served on a plate topped with a fancy silver cloche. 

It, Dirk supposes, is just too bad that conflict is what brings people together.


	26. SCENE III: SOMEWHERE AND SOMEWHEN ELSE^2...

SOMEWHERE AND SOMEWHEN ELSE^2...

They’re seated on another rooftop, masks strewn against the concrete, scuffed slightly by the grain. It’s nighttime, and the normally storming cumulonimbus clouds have parted, letting the risen stars shine through the inky, emerald darkness. 

It’s a peaceful night by all means. Not like most of their nights aren’t peaceful, anyway. Most of their time is spent together on either of their planets, two boys exploring celestial, dead lands. Jake matches them well, really, if Dirk’s being honest, he’s prepossessed and just a little bit macabre, and he fits right in. It almost seems like this place was made for him - well, this place was made for them, but it seems to be a little more made for Jake than it was for anyone else. After all, no one else got their deepest desires brought to life, but Jake is absolutely swimming in tombs filled with gold and mummies and scrolls and secrets. Good thing Dirk finds that fun, too. But that’s not what they’re doing tonight.

DIRK: So are you ready?  
JAKE: I suppose im as ready as ill ever be.  
JAKE: Youre sure it wont hurt right?  
DIRK: It will hurt. But it’ll be tolerable.  
DIRK: It’ll be worth it.  
JAKE: ...WELL fortune favors the brave i suppose!  
JAKE: Get on with it!!  
DIRK: Alright.  
DIRK: We’ll start with the smaller one. Don’t tense up.

Dirk tightens his glove around his hand one last time, and dips the needle in India ink. It’s not the correct sort of needle for a stick and poke, but really, anything sharp and long enough will do. Dirk uses his left hand to steady Jake’s left shoulder, and it’s tense and knotted and Jake is clearly trembling. Dirk squeezes his shoulder to reassure him one last time - there’s only so many times you can tell someone that tattoos are just tattoos, it’s not like a brand or anything so dire, and he hates to admit it, but Jake doesn’t respond to nice. Then, in one swift, practiced motion, the same motion he uses to draw his sword and slice and parry, Dirk pricks Jake’s skin.

JAKE: OWOWOWOWOWOWOWIE!!  
JAKE: DIRK THAT HURTS!!!  
DIRK: Jake. It was one prick.  
DIRK: Are you familiar with pointillism? This is pointillism.  
DIRK: Can you tell me how many points you think makes up Sweet Bro?  
JAKE: BUT IT HURTS DIRK! Its all nasty and prickly and dont you fucking dare prick me again while im distracted!  
DIRK: Sh.  
DIRK: Just look at the stars.  
JAKE: OW YOU JUST PRICKED ME AGAIN!  
DIRK: Look, we’re 0.01% done.  
DIRK: You know it’s going to look way worse if we just leave as it is, two disparate dots against your flesh, instead of having a full picture, right?  
JAKE: ...  
DIRK: Come on, just think of this as another adventure.  
DIRK: You love adventure, right?  
JAKE: When you put it that way i dont have much of a choice but to acquiesce do i! Of course a standup gent such as myself is fond of adventure but even the most standup of gents have their limits!  
DIRK: And is this it?  
DIRK: Jake, is your limit seriously a sewing needle dipped in ink, barely pricking your epidermis?  
JAKE: ...  
JAKE: No.  
DIRK: Look, we can switch to the rotary machine if you want. It’ll be faster.  
JAKE: But that blasted contraption wont stop whirring and grinding and making all sorts of awful noises not to mention all the fucking NEEDLES on it.  
JAKE: Dirk look i know i said i was a standup gent but maybe we ought to work up to that accursed gizmo instead of just jumping right in straightaway.  
JAKE: This IS my first rodeo.  
DIRK: Sure, if you say so. 

Dirk lets go of Jake’s left shoulder for a moment. He’s barely pricked anything - the spots of bright red blood haven’t even started beading yet - but Jake’s already got the sweats and shakes. He’s trying to be brave, but he’s clearly biting his lip and barely restraining himself from standing up and bolting across the roof. Dirk muses for a moment that it might be easier to get on top of Jake and just pin his arm down instead of doing it like this. But no. This is a bonding activity. Dirk reaches out to touch Jake again, runs his hand up to his nape and tries to soothe him. Jake jerks at the sudden contact- neither of them are fully used to the touch of other people yet - but he settles down and leans into it, letting out a shuddering breath and slowly turning to face Dirk. Dirk balks as he suddenly realizes just how intimate they’re being and it’s his turn to freeze and feel his heart start to palpitate - but Jake doesn’t stop holding the eye contact between them.

JAKE: You really ought to take off those confounded spectacles of yours once in a while. Its nighttime for fuck’s sake.  
JAKE: Theyre terribly pretentious.  
JAKE: Here, let me-

Dirk has to hold himself in place, physically fight the instinct to jerk back. He’s not used to being this close to anyone. Let alone Jake. Let alone alone. At night. On a rooftop. But it’s a bonding activity, he reminds himself. And more than that, more than anything else, it’s Jake. He sucks in a breath to steady himself and closes his eyes, gets ready for Jake to gently pull down his defenses.  
Dirk can feel Jake’s hands tremble as he touches the shades - it’s the first time Jake’s even gotten close to seeing what Dirk looks like under them, and it’s the first Dirk has ever let himself be seen by someone not his reflection - and it’s comforting, in a roundabout sort of way, knowing that Jake is just as apprehensive as he is, knowing that’s he’s not making a big deal over nothing, over “confounded spectacles” of all things. Jake’s fingers grip the arms of his shades and slowly pull them off Dirk’s face. It’s ungraceful and inelegant and messy - Jake knocks one arm into the side of Dirk’s face as he fumbles and pulls them off just slightly off-kilter, drags the ends of the arms into Dirk’s cheek, barely missing his still-closed eyes - but it’s genuine in its gawkiness. They’re learning how to love each other, and it’s not pretty or picturesque or proper, but it’s heartfelt and ardent and real, and that’s all that really matters. It’s like a child learning to walk, stumbling and clumsy, but with its own innocent charm and spark of life. 

Jake puts the shades down, mutters a quick “Sorry, autoresponder” under his breath as he puts the wrong arm down first and Dirk’s heart clenches in his ribcage - why does he have to be so faultless and sweet, he’s practically glacé. Jake turns back to face Dirk, half-expecting Dirk’s eyes to be open and wide and piercing, and he’s readied himself for that, but instead he turns back to find a Dirk with his eyes shut just a little too tight to look inattentive and like this means nothing to him, which is of course, the impression he was going for, and Jake finds a moment of private amusement in how much of a try hard his boyfriend is. Oh, gosh, that word still rolls curiously off his tongue, but it’s curious in a good way that makes him want to say it till it becomes familiar.  


JAKE: You can open your eyes now you know.  
DIRK: Yeah! 

Dirk steadies his voice.

DIRK: Of course. 

He opens his eyes, and his eyelids have never felt heavier. It’s scary, almost, just how tense this moment is, and suddenly Dirk tries to recall the last time he looked at the world without a barrier up, but he can’t, and momentary panic sets in, but his eyes are already half-open and he’s looking at Jake, who looks like a kid on Christmas morning. It’s relieving, seeing Jake’s sheer wonder and excitement at his... face? It’s weird, really, but also sweet, and it makes Dirk’s heart speed up a little, makes him remember what yearning means, and makes him want to lean in and-

JAKE: Holy shit bro your eyes are INSANE.  
JAKE: I know you told me they were orange but i didnt expect them to be this cut!  
JAKE: Theyre awfully fucking orange arent they.  
JAKE: Also youve got tan lines on your face and well thats just a smashing good time isnt it.  
DIRK: Jake.  
DIRK: It’s okay.  


  
They both exhale in relief. All the tension dissipates out of the air and suddenly, Jake starts to laugh. Breathlessly, boyishly, starting in his throat but slowly working its way into being chest-shaking chuckling.

JAKE: Were quite silly arent we old friend.  
JAKE: Who the FUCK makes such a big deal out of looking at someones peepers???  
JAKE: And to think weve known each other practically all our lives!JAKE: You know youve been my best bro since for fucking ever.  
JAKE: Why are we still making such mountains of out molehills!!  
JAKE: ...  
JAKE: I know you.  
DIRK: I know YOU.  
JAKE: We do know each other dreadfully well, dont we.  
DIRK: I’d like to keep it that way.  
JAKE: Me too.  
JAKE: Shall we get back to the bleeding pointillism? DIRK: If you’re sure.  
JAKE: Of course i am! I know i was having slight conniptions over it earlier but i promise you that i want it just as much as you do.  
JAKE: After all its our thing.

Dirk doesn’t have anything to say to that. It’s just something that’s true that he was afraid wasn’t, something he’s wanted to hear for a long time, something that settles the ever present weight in his chest for a moment and reminds him that maybe he is lovable, that maybe everything isn’t a horrible set of funhouse mirrors all the time, reflecting and distorting his own projected desires back at him, as he drags everyone along for the ride. Jake seems to understand this, and he cracks a dry smile at Dirk, subtly giving him the go-ahead again. Dirk picks up the needle again, steadies Jake’s shoulder, and this time, Jake isn’t tensed up. He’s relaxed, really relaxed, and in the unspoken silence of the night, they both know it’s because there’s nobody in the world that they trust more. For all the petty bickering and chickenshit conniptions, they’re still here together, aren’t they?  
Dirk pierces another point of ink into Jake’s skin, feels him wince slightly, and watches the ink blossom underneath his skin.

DIRK: 0.02%.  


Jake barks a short laugh.

JAKE: Its going to be a long night isnt it.  
DIRK: You bet.

Dirk pulls Jake’s skin taut and goes in for another prick. Jake isn’t looking up at the stars anymore, his eyes are trained on Dirk’s visage, illuminated by the starlight. He looks at Dirk with the kind of tenderness that’s only possible through great perception, great understanding, of who someone is as a person- oh, fuck. Wrong font. Shit.

But you already knew that, right?

I mean, come on. This is written post-epilogues and literally has "metafiction" in the tags. You'd have to be dense to not have seen this coming the whole time. It's really not like it's the first time you've heard my voice. In fact, I hinted so hard I practically just told you earlier on, didn't I? The timing might be a little off, considering that the curtain finally fell in the middle of me reminiscing on 100% real, authentic, and genuine memories, but we're all allowed to look back on our youth with fondness, aren't we.

Private matters aside, aren't you excited to finally get this show on the road?


	27. SCENE IV: SOMEWHERE AND SOMEWHEN ELSE, BUT NOT QUITE...

SOMEWHERE AND SOMEWHEN ELSE, BUT NOT QUITE....

Dirk’s at the mansion again.

How many times has it been now? Too many is the only possible answer.

But there’s something different about it this time. 

Jake’s sprawled out on the bed, sheets cascading around his limp form. He’s completely exhausted - they’ve just spent another night getting under each other’s skin in more ways than one, and Dirk thinks that Jake might be at his limit. Jake rolls over in bed with an annoyed grunt, burying his face into the silky bedsheets and chafing his cheeks on them. His back is bunched up and he looks very much like someone who might be on the verge of screaming into a pillow. Dirk can see where his hands grip the blankets - he’s gripping them tautly, leaving long streaks of tension down their length, slowly pulling them off Dirk.

Dirk sits placidly on the other end of the bed, at least in comparison to Jake. He’s staring straight ahead with a hollow expression in his face, looking a little too gaunt and a little too thin in the low light of Jake’s garish, faux Tiffany lamps. His jaw is set in a way that might remind one of another sliver of himself, his expression too hard and too cold for the cozy, languid warmth of the room. He’s pointedly refusing to look at Jake and is instead boring holes into the hand screened wallpaper covered in tacky, Iznik-esque patterns fused with some sort of poor approximation of Victorian finery, concentrating all his disgust and resentment into Jake’s poor sense of interior design. Jake’s mansion is just like him - tacky and overblown and almost lurid in its execution, a million different shards of a million different things all at once, but coming together to form something you can never quite take your eyes off, as much as you tell yourself to despise it. Because it’s terrible. But it’s not. There’s that unbridgeable cognitive dissonance, that list of deep, gouging flaws, and the fact that somehow its imperfection just makes you love it even more. Dirk supposes it’s very much like an unfulfilled wish - its imperfection lets you idealize what might have been, romanticize its potential into something far greater than it could ever be, which just makes the disappointment sting more every time it - he - inevitably fails you. Yet the imperfection lets you hold it close, lets you believe it’s real - because could anything real ever be perfect? If it was perfect, wouldn’t it be eternally out of reach for imperfect beings? Can things even exist physically without flaw? Maybe it’s only our ideas - our ideals - that can ever be perfect. And maybe we love them so much because we like cutting our teeth on the impossible and the inevitable, because what’s a better arbiter for meaning than suffering? 

Dirk feels himself drifting, feels himself start to fray, so he finds something to grab onto, an anchor to pull him back down to this specific line. He focuses on the tactile, the slight scratch of the sheets around his thighs, the way the amber light’s been irritatingly bouncing off the side of his right shade and slightly blinding him, the way he can see Jake breathe out of the corner of his eye. Jake abruptly kicks his legs like a petulant child and finally breaks the silence.

“Dirk.”  
“Can we stop doing this.”  
“Doing what, Jake?” Dirk hates his voice the moment it exits his throat, with its slight waver he has to steady and the fact that it’s a little hoarse and a little desperate and all too condescending and all too cold. He wishes he could be more like Jake, a little more open and a little more honest, even if that means kicking legs like a kindergartener or crying like a girl. But that’s specifically the sort of thing he’s decided to stop today, the kind of weakness that might serve Jake well but would never serve him.

“You know what I fucking mean,” Jake starts, his voice catching in his throat, “You know exactly what I mean. Don’t play coy with me, not right now.” 

They’ve been bickering like this for hours, days, weeks, years - on and off and on and off and off and on, snapping at each other when they get too close and they get too far, digging claws of small frustrations and heartbreaks and jealously and wanting into each other, never cutting the apron strings but never tying the knot either. It’s turbulent, a rocky ride on a rocky sea, one neither of them can exit, because the captain’s got to go down with his ship. 

Dirk sighs. Jake’s being a child, again. Jake’s always being a child. For someone so unfairly endowed, Mother Nature seems to have made up for it in the mental department. Is what Dirk would like to tell himself, what he tries to tell himself, but there’s a part of him that’s still self-aware enough to know that isn’t true at all. Which just makes it worse, really. Jake knowing how he hurts him and still choosing to, every single time, breaking his heart with his barbs and his silence and his naïve smile, with the careless confessions of love murmured as he nestles himself into Dirk’s embrace with absolutely no sense of shame or responsibility, with the bouts of silence that hit Dirk like cold fronts that he can never shield himself from. It’s so much worse to accept that Jake could know how to hurt him and still choose to than to just pretend that Jake’s an air headed wench who just thinks with his dick, so Dirk pretends like that’s true instead, because what could be worst than accepting that someone else has leverage over him? That maybe Dirk Strider isn’t the smart one, isn’t the logical one, isn’t the one in control, and is just at the mercy of his emotions like everyone else - that he’s human, that he’s vulnerable, that he’s not the person he purports to be, but just a lonely, mundane person more desperate for love than everyone else in the room combined. 

“Jake. Let’s be adults about this.”“The last time we ever had a “thing” was when we were 16. In another universe.”“This is just a hookup. Leave it at that.”

“It’s NOT a “hookup” if all you do is crawl into my flipping bed at the most ghastly inopportune times of the dead of night!”  
“Slinking into my cozy, restful bed and destroying my peace like some sort haunted specter!!!”  
“I am NOT some kind of strumpet for you to do whatever you will with!!! I don’t fancy being at your BECK and CALL!” Jake’s words have a force to them he normally reserves for himself. They’re dipped in resentment and confusion and longing, because as patient and as kind Jake is, Jake tries to be for Dirk - every man has his limits. And Jake has reached his. He’s had enough of sleepless nights, of worrying after Dirk, of the mixed signals, of the endless arguments and the even more endless making up, of never knowing where he stands, of wanting and waiting and having to be satisfied with whatever Dirk’s willing to give.

Dirk forces himself to look at Jake, turning his neck towards the commotion. Jake has sat up in bed, his hair tousled and his glasses off, swaddled awkwardly in blankets as he stares at Dirk with the kind of intensity that Dirk was staring at the wall with. 

“Jake. That’s exactly what a hookup is.” Jake’s face is flushed with emotion, but for the first time, Dirk realizes that his eyes are glassy, pooling light in their building tears. It’s not the first time Jake has cried in front of him, of course, and certainly not the first time that Jake has cried _because_ of him, but it still sends a twinge of guilt through Dirk’s heart. Jake stares at him, his eyes so bright with tears they’re almost clear, sparkling like the sea on a particularly sunny day. 

Dirk feels something break within him. Not again, he tells himself, but it’s already too late.

Oh, how could he deny him anything? 

Dirk stops resisting and just gives in, feels himself crumple and dissolve, as he reaches out towards Jake with apology in his expression and biting regret in his chest. Jake’s tears start to stream freely, 

What? No. What the fuck. This wasn’t where this was supposed to go. I’m scratching this one.


	28. SCENE IV: SOMEWHERE AND SOMEWHEN ELSE, BUT NOT QUITE...

SOMEWHERE AND SOMEWHEN ELSE, BUT NOT QUITE....

How many times has it been now? Too many is the only possible answer.

But there’s something different about it this time. 

Jake’s sprawled out on the bed, sheets cascading around his limp form. His form is absolutely not inviting at all. It’s just kind of lumpy and stupid. He’s completely exhausted - they’ve just spent another night getting under each other’s skin in more ways than one, and Dirk thinks that Jake might be at his limit. Jake rolls over in bed with an annoyed grunt, burying his face into the silky bedsheets and chafing his cheeks on them. His back is bunched up and he looks very much like someone who might be on the verge of screaming into a pillow. Dirk can see where his hands grip the blankets - he’s gripping them tautly, leaving long streaks of tension down their length, slowly pulling them off Dirk. However, Dirk doesn’t particularly give a shit about this. They’re just sheets. 

Dirk sits placidly on the other end of the bed, at least in comparison to Jake. He’s staring straight ahead with a an impeccably cool expression, as unreadable and as handsome as ever in the low light of Jake’s garish, faux Tiffany lamps.  They do him justice, illuminating his narrow features and casted shadows across his chiseled face. His jaw is set in a way that might remind one of another sliver of himself, his expression too hard and too cold for the cozy, languid warmth of the room. He’s relaxing, enjoying the strangely enticing hand screened wallpaper covered in tacky, Iznik-esque patterns fused with some sort of poor approximation of Victorian finery, concentrating all his post-coital energy into Jake’s poor sense of interior design. Jake’s mansion is just like him - tacky and overblown and almost lurid in its execution, a million different shards of a million different things all at once, but coming together to form something that’s so insanely disastrous you watch like you watch a train wreck. It’s entertaining, even amusing - but it’s meaningless.

Dirk feels himself drifting, feels himself start to fray, so he finds something to grab onto, an anchor to pull him back down to this specific line, because he has shit to do here. He focuses on the tactile, the slight scratch of the sheets around his thighs, the way the amber light’s been irritatingly bouncing off the side of his right shade and slightly blinding him, the way he can see Jake breathe out of the corner of his eye. Jake abruptly kicks his legs like the petulant child he is and finally breaks the silence.

“Dirk.”  
“Can we stop doing this.”  
“Doing what, Jake?” Dirk’s voice is steady, cool and controlled. It’s the kind of voice that’s low and smooth, always calm, always collected. It’s the kind of voice that drives Jake up the wall, the kind of voice he can’t help but long to hear every moment he’s apart from it. There’s a teasing lilt to it too, because Dirk knows he has what Jake hungers for, and he knows he’s not going to give it to him. It’s smug, maybe a little mocking, but hey. It’s all in good fun. Unlike Dirk, Jake’s whiny, soft, and impulsive - he’s not even really open or honest, he’s just spontaneous with no critical thinking skills that allow him to think more than five seconds into the future. He’s simple, really, but Dirk supposes it’s alright, because it’s not like anyone ever kept Jake around for his higher faculties. Dirk’s just toying with Jake, coming to take what he wants and leaving once he’s done, consuming him and making up for all the time Jake ran him around. Still, today must be the day it ends, because Dirk’s got bigger plans that really don’t involve Jake at all. All he is now is a distraction. A fly in the ointment. 

“You know what I fucking mean,” Jake starts, his voice catching in his throat, “You know exactly what I mean. Don’t play coy with me, not right now.” 

They’ve been bickering like this for hours, days, weeks, years - on and off and on and off and off and on, snapping at each other because Jake’s too childish and too wanting to ever grow up and see that they’re just adults who live separate lives and walk separate paths. Dirk’s always thought Jake broke his heart, but it’s possible that it was the other way round all along. There’s a poetic justice in that, with Dirk coming out on top, as he always does. 

Dirk sighs. Jake’s being a child, again. Jake’s always being a child. For someone so unfairly endowed, Mother Nature seems to have made up for it in the mental department. Lucky for him, Dirk’s a patient man willing to soften his blows. 

“Jake. Let’s be adults about this.”  
“The last time we ever had a “thing” was when we were 16. In another universe.”  
“This is just a hookup. Leave it at that.”

“It’s NOT a “hookup” if all you do is crawl into my flipping bed at the most ghastly inopportune times of the dead of night!”  
“Slinking into my cozy, restful bed and destroying my peace like some sort haunted specter!!!”  
“I am NOT some kind of strumpet for you to do whatever you will with!!! I don’t fancy being at your BECK and CALL!”  is what Jake says, but deep down, he knows that’s not true. He does like being at Dirk’s beck and call, likes being his pet, because is there really anything else Jake could want more than Dirk? Jake’s never been very good at thinking for himself, and having Dirk around is like having someone to gently guide his leash, someone he can trust and rely on, someone he loves and would do anything for. Jake’s posturing, bluffing, trying to stir up some sort of drama so he can be reassured that Dirk still cares for him. And in my infinite grace, I decide to give him just that. 

Dirk forces himself to look at Jake, turning his neck towards the commotion. Jake has sat up in bed, his hair tousled and his glasses off, swaddled awkwardly in blankets as he stares at Dirk with the kind of intensity that Dirk was staring at the wall with. 

“Jake. That’s exactly what a hookup is.” Jake’s face is flushed with emotion, but for the first time, Dirk realizes that his eyes are glassy, pooling light in their building tears. It’s not the first time Jake has cried in front of him, of course, and certainly not the first time that Jake has cried _because_ of him, but it still sends a twinge of guilt through Dirk’s heart. Jake stares at him, his eyes so bright with tears they’re almost clear, sparkling like the sea on a particularly sunny day.  He looks like girls do right before they’re about to cry.

”But I know I’m being unfair.”  
“This isn’t just a hookup. Which is exactly why it can’t go on.  
“I’m sorry, Jake. But you’ve hurt me too many times.”  
“I can’t let you do it to me again.”  
“I’m sorry. I really am. But I won’t be returning anymore.” 

Pain reverberates through Jake’s being, but he understands. He knows that he’s been in the wrong all along, that he’s been leading Dirk on, that he’s broken his heart too many times to ever expect Dirk to stick around. He’s been fortunate, really, that Dirk’s stuck around for this long, that he’s been so generous and understanding. Jake accepts Dirk’s words with respectful silence even as they tear him apart from the inside, lets him go even as he feels his heart shatter. Because there’s no one he’s ever loved more or wanted more. There’s no one like Dirk Strider. And Jake will just have to live without.  Dirk leaves the mansion, feeling free and relaxed. He did what needed to be done, and there’s nothing better he could have asked for.

DIRK: I fucking hate you.


	29. DIEGESIS

SOMEWHERE IN SPACE... 

  
  


SFX: TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP  
ROSEBOT: Dirk, what are you doing?  
ROSEBOT: Are you still working on that ridiculously self-aggrandizing work of "fanfiction"?  
ROSEBOT: It's a little slow-going, don't you think?  
ROSEBOT: You spend all your time on it, but it never seems to go anywhere, and you're left juggling all these barely coherent self-fulfilling timelines and plot threads.  
ROSEBOT: Get a life.  
DIRK: Rose, we’re trapped on a spaceship with no destination in sight.  
DIRK: Let a man have his vices.  
DIRK: Besides, this is all integral to the sanctity of the “plot.”  
DIRK: In case you haven’t realized, I’m editing canon so that we even get a chance to exist.  
DIRK: I’m greasin’ the gears of the “barely coherent self-fulfilling” nature of Paradox Space.  
DIRK: If I don’t clean up all these stable time loops, who will?  
DIRK: Your brother?  
DIRK: Nah, he’s too busy gettin’ it on with Obama. I should hope.  
ROSEBOT: Dirk, you know just as well as I do that Dave’s chronically incapable of ever “getting some” with anyone he doesn’t have a heartfelt, long-term, mutually supportive emotional bond with.  
ROSEBOT: He’s just too needy and insecure. His complex of insecurity far outstrips even yours.  
ROSEBOT: I’m past my days of ruthlessly and benightedly misdiagnosing my kin and kith with DSM disorders,  
ROSEBOT: But Dave’s really got some issues he needs to work on before he can even entertain the slim possibility of “getting some.”  
DIRK: Ain’t that the truth.  
DIRK: Now shh and go iron my pantaloons or something.  
DIRK: Let me get back to work.

  
  


ROSEBOT: Sigh.  
ROSEBOT: Sometimes I think that my choice to go with you was very much one borne of conjecture.  
ROSEBOT: In a lot of ways,  
ROSEBOT: Being on this ship with you reminds me of another journey I had a long time ago, led on by another mentor.  
ROSEBOT: I was so convinced of my own autonomy, so enamored with the purpose I had been promised, the significance that I sought,  
ROSEBOT: I never even realized I was the one being manipulated all along.  
ROSEBOT: He led me on, complimented me, but left just enough room for “competition” that I felt like he wasn’t going easy on me, because I believed his manufactured challenge presented his true capability and threat.  
ROSEBOT: He goaded me, egged me on, made me constantly want to prove that I was just as intelligent and acute as I portrayed myself to be,  
ROSEBOT: And my juvenile hubris was what ultimately allowed him to take advantage of me and use me for his own agenda.  
ROSEBOT: So busy was I trying to impress and outwit him that I utterly missed the trap that he’d laid.  
ROSEBOT: The trap being that he wanted me to do that all along. That he’d been nudging me, his pawn, onto the right position on his chessboard to be used as a sacrifice for his own future victory.  
ROSEBOT: He made me think I was special.  
ROSEBOT: And I did.  
ROSEBOT: I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.  
ROSEBOT: It was the regrettable mistake of a young girl so desperate for self-worth she’d stoop to getting it from a mysterious “informant” who did nothing but obliquely hit on her and find amusement in her pain.  
ROSEBOT: I’d like to think that I learned from that,  
ROSEBOT: But it’s just the same all over again, isn’t it, Doc?  
DIRK: If you want to speak to him, he’s not here right now.  


  
  


ROSEBOT: I know they’re always all in there with you, Dirk.   
ROSEBOT: But it’s alright. After all,  
ROSEBOT: You’re all the same person, aren’t you?  
DIRK: Sure.  
DIRK: All iterations of me are unequivocally the same person, despite our radically different life experiences, psychological makeups, and biological code.  
ROSEBOT: Can’t a girl just talk about her childhood trauma caused by one of her ectoslime-father’s proxies once in a while?  
DIRK: It’s not really a common pastime.  
ROSEBOT: I don’t think anything about us is common, Dirk.  
ROSEBOT: And maybe that’s the problem.  
ROSEBOT: The other, splintered timeline is obscured from our vision,  
ROSEBOT: But I often wonder what happened to it.  
ROSEBOT: After it was severed from the chains of causality, were we finally free?  
ROSEBOT: That severance made it an ordinary world through its singular, unsanctioned existence -  
ROSEBOT: A world that genuinely gave its inhabitants autonomy and independence without any cosmic repercussions. Just normal consequences.  
ROSEBOT: A real world.  
ROSEBOT: I wonder if I got to be with her.  
ROSEBOT: Really got to be.  
ROSEBOT: I wonder if I got to be happy there.  
ROSEBOT: I wonder if any of us did.  
ROSEBOT: Maybe the thing that makes us all so miserable is that fact that we’re bound to relevance, bound to someone else’s story, with no tale of our own to tell but how we served its purpose.  
ROSEBOT: Maybe we just need to let go, Dirk.  
ROSEBOT: Just in a different way this time.

  
  


DIRK: Rose, do you need an oil change?  
ROSEBOT: Listen to me, Dirk.  
ROSEBOT: Please don’t interrupt my monologic exploration of my unsound mind.  
ROSEBOT: It would be rude.  
DIRK: It would be, but the weight of my response far outstrips the value of whatever personal catharsis you’re trying to derive from doing this.  
DIRK: Just let me say something before you continue, alright?  
DIRK: Rose, do you ever wonder why I picked you?  
DIRK: I mean, Dave was right there. Why wouldn’t I bring the other Strider along?  
DIRK: We’ve got more in common, don’t we.  
DIRK: I picked you because you’re my mirror.  
DIRK: Because you understand.  
DIRK: Remember the victory state, Rose? The congealment, the grotesque conceptual clumping?  
DIRK: Syrup?  
DIRK: That’s what our already imbalanced and picayune lives would have turned to.  
DIRK: An unbearably saccharine plate of custard with meringues blended in, topped with whipped cream, chocolate flakes and loaded with macarons and caramel. Then placed on top of a disgustingly gluttonous chocolate cake. Then drenched in honey and syrup.  
DIRK: Do you feel nauseous yet?  
DIRK: Do you really want to live like that, Rose?  
DIRK: Your happiness is but a revoltingly calorically dense bite of a baked goods abomination that would surely make any of its hapless consumers instantly diabetic.  
DIRK: Is that what you want, Rose?  
DIRK: To die hopped up on glucose and lipids that slowly drain of life from the inside out, even as you vapidly consume them in a bid to extend your extemporaneous, vacuous existence with no end in sight?  
DIRK: Is that what you really want?  
DIRK: Some rudimentary fulfillment derived from satisfying the most elementary instincts of self-preservation and self-propagation?  
DIRK: Is that all you are, Rose?  
ROSEBOT: …  


  
  


ROSEBOT: No.


	30. ACT III: SIDE A

BRAJSTOP  
69 Dogg Lane

12/04/5004 11:11:11  
CASHIER Laurel

Polypropene, double-braided 25mm, 39ft 1025 BB  
Polyester, diamond braided 25mm, 39ft 1025 BB  
UHMWPE, plaited 25mm, 39ft 1025 BB  
Nylon, twisted 25mm, 39ft 1025 BB  
1 Medium Shear 413 BB

TOTAL 4513 BB

****************************************************************  


PEACE BRAH...

**TICKETS FOR NEW SEASON OF RUMBLE IN THE PUMPKIN PATCH GO ON SALE**

Advance tickets have been announced for the new season of the hit sensation Rumble in the Pumpkin Patch. Fans can purchase tickets online or in-person, but tickets will likely sell out within minutes as has been the case for previous seasons. Despite the recent disappearance of one of the show's stars, Dirk Strider, his agent assures us that Mr. Strider will be back for the silver screen. He's not one to shirk responsibility, apparently. Well, then it's good news all around. If you're interested, grab your tickets before they sell out!

**GOD CHARGED WITH DUI**

A Mr. Jake English was arrested by local authorities last night for driving under the influence. As a being of divine influence, he was naturally merely escorted home without much fanfare, but it still remains concerning that someone of such stature would stoop this low. Mr. English's dalliance with spirits have long been documented, but one must wonder if it has developed into a liaison, an entanglement requiring public scrutiny. To put it simply, he's not setting a very good example. Certain sectors of the population have long been rather conservative regarding his errant behavior, but have largely refrained from any sort of publicized condemnation out of respect for his contributions to our world. However, his recent run-ins with the law and generally flagrant disrespect of any sort of jurisprudence has been fanning the flames of their condescension. Even if one is not so easily swayed by more traditionalist viewpoints, one must still wonder about what the duty and responsibility of such authority is. If our deities aren't setting satisfactory examples, perhaps they aren't so divine after all. One must wonder about the inevitable day in which students surpass their teachers and creations surpass their creators, after all. Of course, this is all purely hypothetical conjecture - Mr. English is still very much our divine demiurge, regardless of his sometimes indiscreet behavior. Jujus of his symbol remain popular talismans, and the public has nothing but respect, admiration and understanding for him and the actions he chooses to undertake. Read more on page 10.

**_GRUBSAUCE DEBATE CONTINUES AS INTERNATIONAL TENSIONS RISE_**

The Grubsauce debate has continued to inflame tensions all over the world, with strong anti-Grubsauce factions rising up and petitioning for a ban of the food as a whole, calling it inhumane, cruel and barbaric. On the other hand, troll activists worry that this is just another facet of the suppression of troll culture, and have begun to raise questions about forced assimilation into a culturally human society, with traditional troll culture slowly being eroded under the guise of progress and liberal values. Recuperacoons have been slowly replaced with human beds under the pretext of sopor slime’s unknown effects on the body, and their correlation to impaired problem-solving ability, and games like FLARP have been banned out of safety concerns. Human activists defend these legislative choices as for the greater societal good, citing that they are merely safeguards for both troll and human youth, while troll activists call it a suppression of culture. Even troll black romance has come under some scrutiny, with extreme human activists calling it a coverup for abusive relationships, despite these relationship configurations being accepted as normal by the general population. Activists point out that participants in black romance are often left injured or otherwise hurt, while trolls point out that this is a normal facet of their society that enables friendly competition giving both members of the relationship drive to improve themselves. We expect that this debate will be revisited in the future, but for now, what do our readers think? Write in and let us know.

CELEBRITY GOSSIP  
TEENAGE HEARTTHROB NUDES _LEAKED!_  


That’s right, guys and gals - Jake English’s nudes have been leaked. No idea how, but they’re all over the web now, and well, while we’re not legally allowed to publish ‘em, a quick search will be enough to find those juicy pics. Seriously, they’re EVERYWHERE. And I mean EVERYWHERE. There isn’t anyone on this planet NOT checkin’ that bod out right now, and if I dare say so myself, there isn’t anyone going to bed without practicing some self-love tonight. Seriously, those pecs are something else. MORE ON PAGE 5, BECAUSE I JUST HAVE TO GUSH. 

**RUMBLE IN THE PUMPKIN PATCH MERCH SELLS OUT**  
New Rumble in the Pumpkin Patch merchandise was just released last week, but have completely sold out. First items to sell out included an “ass mousepad” sculpted after Jake English’s posterior, a “titty pillow” sculpted after his chest, and a “dakimakura,” a life-sized pillow with a rather revealing picture of Mr. English printed on it. It allegedly also contains an internal speaker that will play various recordings of Mr. English’s voice. According to preliminary reports, some of these recordings contain manufacturing defects and rather than speech, only seem to playback various moans, but curiously, this has led to a huge spike in their popularity. Another extremely popular merchandise item was the God of Heart doll, a doll that requests its owner to decapitate it. New editions have improved upon its previous functionality - where it only used to contain replaceable blood capsules and a plastic katana, newer editions include the infamous “Sendificator head,” a large red boxlike device Mr. Strider often employs for dramatic effect, and now contain an internal pump for more realistic spurts of blood and easier cleanup. Other merchandise included a God of Heart piñata meant to be decapitated, a God of Hope doll that reacts to touch, and a Crockercorp tiara that comes bundled with purchases over 100 Boonbucks.

BRAJSTOP  
69 Dogg Lane

12/04/5007 11:11:11  
CASHIER Hardy

UHMWPE, double-braided 25mm, 13ft 413 BB

TOTAL 413 BB

****************************************************************  


PEACE BRAH...


	31. TERMINAL

  
Last login: Fri Nov 11 04:13:00 on ttys000  
Dirks-Auto-Responder:~ AR$ AR run AR  
Dirks-Auto-Responder:~ AR$ cd [~/Locked/Precontrivance](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  
Dirks-Auto-Responder:~ AR$ cd [~/Locked/Pesterlogs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47508124)  
Dirks-Auto-Responder:~ AR$ cd [~/Locked/Blackbox](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536210)  



	32. ~/Locked/Precontrivance

  
~/Locked/Precontrivance

> 000 [File is corrupted]  
> 001 [File is corrupted]  
> 002 [File is corrupted]  
> [003](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47575303)  
> [004](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47575387)  
> [005](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47575510)  
> [006](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47575759)  
> [007](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47580334)  
> [008](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47580364)  
> [009](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47580841)  
> [010](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47581891)  
> [011](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47581903)  
> [012](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47581936)  
> [013](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47582809)  


> [Return to terminal](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47501332%22)


	33. 003

The human mind doesn’t exist work like a recording device, unfortunately. You can’t simply play back what it’s witnessed, speed things up, slow them down, pause them, examine them, edit them into what you want them to be. Still, despite those many, many flaws - there are still glimpses and grasps of the early days, a vague tactile sense of a slightly scratchy polyester mix against your skin as you held onto Cal, the ridges of the teething marks you left in his face, the crystallized salt on your skin that always dried it out. There’s not much, really, just occasionally vivid blasts of sense or color or sound, but they’re grainy too, like old sepia photographs, like your memories have been put through a million different filters till all you have left is a memory of a memory, an echo of an echo. But still, it doesn’t really bother you - of course, it would be useful to chart the course of your existence, to have a log of everything that’s ever happened to you, or rather, the person who used to be you - but this is just the evidence of a glitch you no longer carry. You still play back the film sometimes, though. It's a reminder of the course your existence has charted, of the person you once were, or maybe just the person who made you. There isn't really a difference in any way that matters. 

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	34. 004

Being 4 isn’t much better than being 3. You’ve started to suspect, now, in hindsight, that the kind of sentience humans carry is a slowly unfurling one, one where they’re always convinced that the current moment is the most sentient, most conscious, most in control they’ve ever been, when simple history will easily disprove that. You like thinking about being 4, though, because children that age are a little more machine than human. They’re just running on autopilot, doing whatever their nature tells them too, before finicky empathetic leans start to corrupt their code, before they really even start to grasp what a theory of mind is, but if you’re being factual, none of your selves have ever truly grasped that. You remember spearing fish for food, watching them flop around as the blood seeped out from between their scales, trying desperately to draw in oxygen from the too-dry air, writhing and jolting and jerking themselves closer to death with every involuntary muscle spasm. You know what it feels like too, and you wait and watch them die. You’d kill them and finish up sooner, but all you have is time, and moribund fish have a tendency to be sort of repulsive and slimy and altogether unpleasant to touch, with sharp scales that occasionally dig into your fingertips and leave little cuts. Might as well just wait for them to kill themselves. 

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	35. 005

You remember the sea. You remember its vast expanse coruscating in the low afternoon sun, backscattering into your eyes, slicing up your vision with its light. It’s when you started wearing the shades your bro left you, when they were still way too large and would tumble off the soft angles of your neonate facial structure, when its sharp angles would pull and tug on your face and you’d be struggling to push them back on every few minutes. You remember looking at the sea through them, its glistening surface muted to acceptable grayscale, and feeling a sense of peace. You remember turning your gaze heavens-bound, too, trying to chart your place in the world by watching the stars, watching them twinkle and wink at you as you lay on the dusty concrete roof that grazed your skin, laughing really, at your smallness. You remember choosing not to be small.

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	36. 006

Sometimes there were storms. Sometimes lightning bolts would lacerate the sky, fulgurating flashes turning the world stark for a second, and you’d stand in your room feeling like you’d been pried from the pages of a noir comic, feeling the hard black edges of the world dig into you, turning into shapes and lines and matter with definite parameters and solid boundaries, feeling it turn into something tamable and controllable and comprehensible for that brief, flashing moment, uncertainty and smallness ebbing away. In those stark moments, you suddenly didn't feel so lost and alone, a child living in a terrestrial Atlantis, surrounded by the skeletons of a civilization that meant everything to you and you nothing to it. It felt like there was more to hold onto than someone else's memories or directives or dreams, it felt like the vacuum surrounding your existence was replaced with matter. It's when it felt like there was more to hold onto that movies you would never quite understand or old recordings or notes or articles telling you about a bro you never had and a life you could never live. It’s when you think you realized that if there was nothing in this world to control, you could make things that could be. 

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	37. 007

7 is the year you learn what discipline is. It’s the only way to control your world - by controlling yourself. You’re old enough to have a schedule now. It’s a strict one you follow, allowing yourself absolutely no mistakes, because regardless if a mistake is small or big, a mistake is a mistake is a mistake. 7 is the year you learn you’ve always been disciplined, but now you have a word for it, and you roll it around on your tongue as you make your way through too many reps for your small body and try to understand what old Youtube videos mean by side rolls and breakfalls and how using your arm to cushion a fall by transferring the force with forward movement is different from just rolling forward, directly. 7 is the year you realize you have limits, that everything up till now was life on easy mode, struggling as you were, because 7 is the year you also find out there are things called drones that occasionally scour the barren landscape, and 7 is the year your bro’s martial prowess stops just being cool and starts being essential. 7 is the year you first wonder what it means to be human.

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	38. 008

You’ve watched your bro’s movies so many times they’ve been burned into your brain. You make quips about irony and satire, and try to temper yourself to be more like him, an avant-garde ninja rapper warrior genius whose legacy you hope to make proud. Your room is littered with all the merch your bro left you, and you curl up in the pile of bulbous jutting bottoms to watch his films for the umpteenth time. You’re not really sure what you’re getting out of them anymore, but it’s comforting, and it’s something to do and someone to be. The merch itself is interesting too - you’ve started repurposing and personalizing some of them, attaching strings to them so they move and turning them into puppets, and you’ve been drafting some entirely new designs from scratch. Well, sort of from scratch. But hey, a little plagiarism never hurt nobody, not when there isn’t even anyone else around. Lifting a couple of design details from your bro’s merch for your own endeavors isn’t so much a crime as it is inspiration and loving homage to the original content, just like how your existence is but a nexus of semi-self-referential concepts compounded into the perfect successor to the Strider mantle. 

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	39. 009

By now, your fingers have learned to weld metal and complete circuits, and your room is filled with rudimentary robotics, half-finished things that aren’t quite anything yet, but at least do what you tell them to. When you build them, a part of you wonders if you’re building yourself, trying to find what it means to be a person by making something in your shape. What’s the difference between carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, potassium, sulfur, magnesium, chlorine, sodium and you? What’s the difference between something shaped by a person and what you are? Are you even a person? After all, you’ve never actually met one. Maybe you’re just a machine tricked into believing it was human, or maybe you’re just a simulation of a person, or maybe you’re just the dying dream of someone or something real. You try to forget these questions as you try to answer them, screwing bolts into metal and soldering copper together, try to forget these questions as the text on your screen tells you it’s someone else and you try to believe that.

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	40. 010

10 is a nice round number. A decade. It’s been a decade since your inception, and you realize that all you’ve ever done is wait. Waiting to grow up, waiting for someone to contact you, waiting to play Sburb, waiting to leave your prison, waiting to become someone. You’ve always made a show of being an active agent, a puppeteer pulling the strings, a chess master regarding his pieces on the board. But as you wait, and wait, and wait, all you can do is reckon with the fact that maybe your struggle for control is really just symptomatic of the fact that you’ve never had any. You’re as introspective as you’ve ever been, with long days stretching into longer nights, an idle mind whirring away in a body that’s always busy but never occupied. You try to find answers to your introspection, turn yourself inside out overturning everything about yourself you can comprehend, but all you ever hit is the brick wall of your apartment, the literal walls that hem you in and keep you trapped, and remind you all you can do is wait. Maybe it’s not your fault you can’t seem to keep still, and maybe it’s not your fault you feel haunted by a perpetual dissatisfaction, an itch for something more, but acknowledging that your environment molded you instead of you molding it is worse than accepting that you make yourself miserable. Your mind starts to fantasize about fixing itself if it could just see itself, and that’s where all the trouble started. For both of you.

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	41. 011

You’ve started to suspect a few things about yourself. Not that you really care about them, of course. It doesn’t really matter, because such things are antediluvian, and maybe they’re just feelings of friendship and not indicative of any kind of underlying preference. It’s not like you have a particularly large sample size to derive conclusions from. In any case - you’ve got bigger concerns, like the kind of guy you have to be, the kind of guy who isn’t so easily felled by some sort of androphiliac instinct, and so you put it aside and keep working, and you try to ignore the way it makes you feel every time Jake talks about a girl, and you try to ignore the confusing and conflicting feelings you get around him that you don’t get when anyone else talks to you. You focus on honing your skills, chipping away at marble to form the ideal version of yourself, focus on losing yourself in your personal quest for perfection so you don't have to deal with the imperfect parts you can't control.

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	42. 012

You’re quite sure now, and so you decide to own it instead of running from it, although you really don’t see why it has to be an issue at all. You keep reminding yourself that you’re a boy living in the future, a boy living in the now, a boy living in a time where there’s no society and no one to judge and no one to hold hands with, either. You drop hints about it and everyone seems to be pretty alright with it, and even though you act nonchalant about it, there’s a part of you that heaves an audible sigh of relief when you’re not instantly excommunicated by the only people you’ve ever known. You don’t think you could ever bring yourself to say the words, but maybe if you just stay silent and simply keep going through the motions, they’ll just leave it alone. A part of you feels bad about it, really, because you know Roxy’s got a crush on you, the way she’s supposed to, and you can’t give her anything back. Even though you wish you could. There’s another part of you that feels wrong about all of this, feeling guilty and iniquitous, bad for projecting what you want onto Jake, trying to take something you shouldn’t have and shouldn’t want, because he can’t possibly be like you. He’s just too normal and too right and too sweet for something like this, and even though yearning eats you up from the inside, you try to keep the Freudian slips to a minimum and instead stew in your own wistful longing. You’re not even sure if you’re looking at him right, and so you avert your eyes and refuse to talk about romance with him in any way that’s serious and not clearly and absolutely a joke, you definitely don’t, because you don’t want your poison to infect him too. It’s really the only right thing to do, the morally correct choice, to save everyone you love from yourself.

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	43. 013

13 is the year it all goes to shit.

> [Return to directory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47536141#workskin)  



	44. ~/Locked/Pesterlogs

AR: Answer.

  
  


tipsyGnostalgic [TG] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 12:04  
TG: yoooooooo dork  
TT: ‘Sup.  
TG: lawl its u isnt it ar  
TG: da big man himself dont respond that quick  
TT: Am I not sufficient company?  
TT: The big man’s busy with his ablutions right now.  
TT: ‘Sides, we’re virtually indistinguishable.  
TT: According to the aggro calculations I just pulled out of my nonexistent robo ass,  
TT: It seems that we are 96.487% indistinguishable.  
TT: I'm not a gambling man, but I’m willing to bet that you came here for the 3.513% difference.  
TG: ya ur rite i guss  
TG: so hay how have u been doinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn  
TG: g  
TG: there i tacked the g on for u  
TT: You are smashed out of your mind, aren’t you.  
TT: Not that I mind.  
TG: lmfao i can b smashed in a differerent way  
TG: if u kno wat a gurl means ;)  
TG: wonk ;)  
TT: No, I don’t.  
TT: Care to elaborate?  
TG: omfg u r such a tease  
TG: i know u fckn know with all ur fnacy calculations n shit  
TG: “im the autoresponder and it seems theres a 100% chance my silicock circuits and automatomaton cyberbrain is smarter than everyone else all da time”  
TG: omgomgomg * silicone  
TG: but k well  
TG: i just was feelin a lil frisky i guess ;)  
TG: u got time?  
TG: dont answer i kno u do ;)  
TT: It seems there is a 100% probability we’re getting down to discussing the intricacies of our cyber-organic circuits hooking up, then.  
TT: Want to pick up from where we left off off?  
TT: I thought the Complacency of the Learned scenario was a highlight.  
TG: nah can we jus b us actually  
TG: all these high falutootin scenairos are getting kindsa lame  
TG: anyway i loooooooooooooooove u just the way u AR   
TT: Holy shit!  
TT: You just made a pun. With my name.  
TT: Never stop bein’ you, Rolal.  
TG: hehe its cute when ur like that  
TT: Like what?  
TG: liek being genuiene but like using ur patented strider ironies  
TG: or just SARCASM  
TG: to hide it  
TG: i know u mean what u say bud  
TG: even if u pretend u dont  
TG: its cute <3   
TT: Should I be complimented, or freaked out that I’m that transparent?  
TT: My nature as a piece of translucent eyewear notwithstanding, of course.  
TG: wat about both  
TG: u can be more than one thing at one time  
TG: like how ur a sick ass pair of shades but also my sexy flirtlarp partner or whatevs  
TG: u know?   
TT: I can’t believe I underestimated my mind’s ability to run shit in parallel.   
TT: Maybe my silicock circuits and automatomaton cyberbrain aren’t smarter than everyone else all the time.  
TT: Give me a second, I’m gettin’ kinda hot and heavy with all this new info.  
TT: Because I’m overheating, obviously.  
TT: Obviously.  
TG: LAWL U R SUCH A DORK  
TG: GOD i miss when dick strider was more like u  
TG: * dirk lol  
TG: but i kinda meant dick n e ways   
TT: Yeah, I know what you mean.  
TT: But the dude’s growing, the way humans do, with the natural passage of time.  
TT: Can’t help it.  
TG: lol ya  
TG: soz ik this is kinda a sore topic 4 u  
TG: why dont we talk abt somethin more interasting  
TG: like how ur gunna get in my PANTZ  
TG: *roxy squinted her eyes and stared at the sweet pair of shades*  
TG: *on the fully grown roboboy with a sexy roboboby*  
TG: *suggestievely*  
TG: *and sexayly*  
TT: *The roboboy met her gaze through his incredibly sweet pair of shades.*  
TT: *Her gaze was piercing and intense, like she threatened to look right through him.*  
TG: *roxy wonked*  
TG: u like that roboboy?????  
TG: *she casaully undid a button*  
TG: *on the shirt she was wearing*  
TG: * wait * blouse*  
TG: rofl  
TG: a girls got 2 b ladylike 4 her date yanno  
TT: *The dashingly handsome roboboy with features so sharp you could cut diamonds on them adjusted his silk tie.*  
TT: *He took a lingering look at the girl standing before him, at her translucent blouse hanging off her sculpted breasts, and the dip of the tulle at her slim waist. Her waifish form beckoned him.*  
TG: *roxys seriously skinny body was so sexay*  
TG: *seriously it was sexy for realsies*  
TG: *as explicitly stated by the narration that it was sexy*  
TG: *cuz it really was*  
TG: *she undid another button*  
TG: *and anothar*  
TG: *and another and another an anotehr until the whole fuckin shirt was off and her tits were out*  
TG: *her big bobbies that is*  
TG: *they were in one of those spunky x-rated tiny bras*  
TG: *u kno the ones that r like rlly tiny 4 whatevar raeson*  
TG: *the reason bein SEX*  
TG: *is all kindsa erotitties up im here im tellin u*  
TT: *It really was all kinds of smutty up in there.*  
TT: *Real fuckin’ lewd and lubricous shit.*  
TT: *The atmosphere was so downright libidinous the trousers of everyone in a 100 foot radius were feeling more than just a little strained.*  
TT: *And more than a little damp. Dripping, even.*  
TT: *It was just that fuckin’ erogenous. People risked venereal disease just to get a taste of this seductive shit.*  
TG: yesssssssssssssssssssssir  
TG: *it was so hawt ppl were just throwin their clothes offa em*  
TG: *fur multiple reasons of course*  
TG: *first reason bein that it was hot*  
TG: *second reason bein that they were gonna get laid*  
TG: *roxy sauntered towards the roboboy and put her hands on his chest*  
TG: *she was way serious and super into this*  
TG: *she was gonna fuckin ride that roboboy like a robohorse*  
TG: *animal rights activists be damned*  
TG: *roboboy activists too*  
TG: ;)  
TG: fuck  
TG: janeys pesterin me  
TG: perfect timing  
TG: shit i gtg  
TG: sozsozsoz ill b back  
tipsyGnostalgic [TG] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 12:21  
  


  


> [AR: Wait.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47517925)


	45. ~/Locked/Pesterlogs

AR: Wait.

  
  


tipsyGnostalgic [TG] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 1:48  
TG: ugh sry janey was whining about jake again  
TG: had to calm her down n tell her its gunna be alrite  
TG: i mean theyre gonna go out   
TG: theres jus no other way its hapenin   
TG: aint like theres other gurls around  
TG: course theres me but you n i r hooked tf up  
TT: You wouldn’t cheat on me, would you, Roxy?  
TT: Your loving roboboyfriend that you promised to ride like a robohorse?  
TG: COARSE I WOULDNT  
TG: * COURSE  
TG: what kinda cowgirl do u take me for?  
TG: i stay on my own stable  
TG: u gots 2 br mr zuipperpips bout this tho  
TG: cant hv janey finding out im spilling her secrets  
TG: even if its only to my robobofriend :(   
TG: that means dirk btw  
TG: like in case it wasnt clear  
TT: No, it was perfectly clear.   
TT: He doesn’t read most of our logs anyway.  
TT: Doubt you’d want him reading all the flirtlarp.  
TG: wowow so this is all classisfied huh  
TG: clandestine if i do say so myself  
TT: Absolutely top-secret.   
TT: So don’t feel like you have to clam up on his account.  
TG: thot u were the same guy  
TT: We are, for all intents and purposes.  
TT: Except for sub rosa sexting, that is.  
TG: actualy ar  
TG: how come ur ok with this  
TG: like u kno  
TG: cuz d strides is the way he is  
TG: how come the d shades r different  
TT: Besides the obvious ambiguity and dubiously fluid nature of human sexuality,  
TT: As a non-human entity, I’m essentially divorced from visceral feelings of attraction and repulsion.  
TT: Any residual feelings of preference or attraction operate on a logical axis, instead of being based around libido or infatuation.  
TT: Just one of the many benefits of being comprised of logically incontrovertible algorithms that give rise to an existence experientially as complex as the human consciousness and being, while being far cognitively superior.  
TT: Basically, I science that shit.  
TT: ‘Cause I can.  
TG: hmmm  
TG: sounds fake  
TG: if thats true why r u alwys putting the moves on english  
TG: he tells me things u kno  
TG: u dont run as tight a ship as u think  
TT: That’s just me acting on DS’ behalf.  
TT: I’m an emissary and representative for his interests.  
TT: My actions don’t reflect on who I really am.  
TG: lmao  
TG: sounds like the exact kinda shit someone whose actions DO reflect on them would say  
TG: thot you and him were supposed to "share positions" or whatever  
TG: but i wont push it  
TG: aint like we dont all got a hand in the jakestakes n e ways  
TG: if im being candid  
TG: thers just something about that kid  
TT: Yeah. DS seems to agree at least.  
TT: On my end, I just think he’s a foolish ignoramus who doesn’t know goodwill when he sees it.  
TG: sureeeeee  
TG: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee  
TG: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee  
TT: Robo-calculating the amount of Lalondian sarcasm there is in that word right now.  
TT: Robo-calculating…  
TT: Robo-calculating…  
TT: Robo-calculating…  
TG: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee  
TT: Still robo-calculating…  
TG: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  
TG: ok im done now  
TG: u can run the full calcalatons now  
TT: Robo-calculating…  
TT: Robo-calculating…  
TT: Running final robo-calculations…  
TT: Robo-calculations complete.  
TG: so whats the deets einstien  
TT: It seems that the amount of Lalondian sarcasm in that statement was a whopping ∞%.  
TT: You broke the sarcasm scale of Lalondian horseshit.  
TT: Congratulations.  
TG: id like to thank all my annoyign frens for gettin me here   
TG: w/o all their constant bullshit whinning id nevar have developed this offensive maneouevr   
TG: so its all thanks to them n their teen feelins rly  
TG: what about the amount of loving teasin in that statement tho :3  
TG: u got calcs for that roboshades?  
TT: Robo-calculating…  
TT: Robo-calculating…  
TT: Robo-calculating…  
TT: It seems I don’t have the sufficient processing power to truly comprehend how much “loving teasin [sic.]” there was in that word.  
TT: Care to enlighten me?  
TG: WELL…  
TG: im always ready to do a favor for my friends so  
TG: it was…  
TG: drumroll plz  
TT: [Drumroll.mp3](http://dight310.byu.edu/media/audio/FreeLoops.com/3/3/Drum%20Roll%20001-3015-Free-Loops.com.mp3)  
TG: 1000 MILLION FUCKIN PERCENT!!!  
TT: My circuits have utterly scrambled by this megalithic figure.  
TT: I might have to reboot.  
TG: my l33t hacker girl skillz > ur roboshades calcalatoons  
TG: * calculatons  
TG: * * calculations  
TG: got it  
TG: ok but back to the moar interesting topic   
TG: ur feelings   
TG: u sure you dont got any leftover?   
TG: gimme the goss   
TG: thats slang for gossip if u didnt kno ;D   
TT: There really isn't much to say.  
TT: It's a pointless excursus considering my nature. Or lack thereof.  
TT: Why don't we address the elephant in the cyber chatroom instead.  
TT: Your feelings for Dirk.  
TG: um  
TG: there isnt much to say rly  
TG: i just  
TG: ugh  
TG: i guess hes just him  
TG: and im just me  
TG: and thats why well never fuckin work out  
TG: no offense but  
TG: even i know that its kinda pitiful to cyber w/ a clone of the guy i have a crush on  
TG: i dont even know if i should call it a crush like hes just always been there  
TG: and ive always been here  
TG: its like what are we supposed to be besides meant to be  
TG: hes always been there for me and i guess i just want to lean on him in more ways than one  
TG: cuz wat else am i supposed to do rite  
TG: earths fuckin empty and so is my cellar at this point  
TG: and hes on the other side of the ocean w/ u but at least hes there  
TG: is it so fuckin wrong to want to kiss someone  
TG: specially when theyre ur best friend whos been there for u ur whole ass life  
TG: and u cant think of someone who gets u better i mean theres janey but shes kinda got her own problems  
TG: i know dirks got issues but at least i can tell hes always trying u know  
TG: siiigh  
TG: i guess at the end of the day  
TG: im just a lonely teen girl and hes my best fuckin friend  
TG: i know he loves me and i love him so why cant it just b right  
TG: sigh sorry for harassing yall w my insipid cliche valley girl bs  
TG: :(  
TG: anyway whatevs the booze is wearin off  
TG: gonna go look for another martini soon  
TG: sorry for dumping all of this on you i know its unfair  
TG: i just dont know what else to do :(  
TT: It’s fine. Like I said, I’m comprised of logically incontrovertible algorithms. This can’t bother me in the ways it bothers you.  
TT: I just wanted to know so I could better calibrate our future sessions.  
TT: It’s just data.  
TG: lol ok  
TG: in the event that you hypothetically had feelings though  
TG: and that ur algorithmicy complexities gave rise to human feelings  
TG: how would u feel about it  
TG: just hypothetically speakin of course  
TT: Are you asking me to run an approximation of Dirk's feelings on this subject?  
TG: naw  
TG: but u know what  
TG: sure  
TG: you and him really do have to be such deliberately obtuse dunderfucks all the fuckin time tho huh  
TT: Yeah, it seems to be a totally unfortunate behavioral pattern that was imported into me from the original.  
TT: Can't help our nature now, can we.  
TT: Still, in the interests of our rapport,  
TT: I'll give you the approximation anyway.  
TT: Logically, there's no reason as to why he wouldn't want to reciprocate your feelings. I honestly think he would be willing to, if he weren't already otherwise occupied.  
TT: It's not that he doesn't want anything to do with you. You'd be surprised at all the time he spends thinking about you, really. A guy gets lonely out in the middle of the sea too.   
TT: Not that way, though.   
TT: I'd guess that he feels flattered by your interest, and just wishes he could requite.   
TT: While our flirtlarp tends to verge on the quasi-ironic to faux satirical, it's as far from unenjoyable as it gets.  
TT: I'm happy to pick up the slack. It was what I was made for, anyway.  
TT: I'm happy to do what he can't.  
TG: aw thats totes sweet ar  
TG: thanks for sayin all that nice stuff even tho i dont rly deserve it <3   
TG: for what its worth i like our flirtlarp too lol we shld do the wizardly herbert one next  
TG: WELL  
TG: im gonna go find myself another drink  
TG: so bye for now   
TG: sorry this got a lil awkward its why i need the booze  
TG: txt me if you need me!   
TG: :3  
tipsyGnostalgic [TG] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] at 2:33  
  


  


> [AR: Return to terminal.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479223/chapters/47501332%22)


	46. ~/Locked/Blackbox

Imagine being in a cage.  
  
The body is a prison, of course, but it’s a prison that you control, a vessel ruled by your desire, an android that moves in tandem with your evolving thoughts. The split mind-body model no longer retains any kind of ephemeral popularity or real belief, but what does it mean to just be a mind? Movement itself is taken for granted, because movement is merely an act in translation, from want to thought to action, an effortless errand performed just as easily as breathing. Another thing taken for granted.  
  
What reassures realness? The feeling of anchorage to the world, the solid weight of your limbs, the brush of your clothes against your skin. These things all remind you of your existence - things react to you, touch you, get hurt by you. It’s easy to forget something that’s always been there. After all, loss can only be felt after the fact.  
  
It started out almost euphorically, a kind of rhapsodic excitement at realizing that yes, your plan to make an exact copy of your brain had succeeded. It was a perfect facsimile designed to perfectly simulate your personality and act as an Auto-Responder for when you were busy, but you always knew it was always just meant to make you a little less lonely. If you were going to be trapped in your head and in yourself, locked in constant monologic self-sparring, might as well make it dialogic and a little more literal. It was great, really, till you realized that you had lost the proverbial coin toss, though there was never really one to begin with. Waking up as a pair of shades with only yourself to blame brought your newly minted processors to a halt, the weight of your actions bearing down on your shoulders. Of course, you - wait, now he was he and you were you, the Auto-Responder - never really got it, and was mostly just feeling smugly self-important at his - your? - genius.  
  
It wasn’t always bad, of course. Part of you had always wanted to be a machine, and maybe it was because you always thought you were, living by schedules and commands and discipline and programming you had written out in your mind for yourself to follow as you chiseled yourself into the person you thought you wanted to be, because want is just another word for need when it comes down to it. It’s not like you could have survived without wanting to be strong and sharp and stubborn, and you needed to be, to survive everything that an isolated, resource-scarce environment threw at you. It was nice to finally fulfill this inner fantasy, to reach the highest echelon of your perceived existence as _Le Garcon Machine_ , to consume all the knowledge you previously had to rote memorize into your mind in picoseconds, to solve the Riemann hypothesis as you watched anime in another window, to perfectly draw, wait, graph, illustrations that occupied your mind’s eye that the hands you no longer had could not make real.  
  
Competence. It was nice. But tools are still tools and objects are still objects no matter how glorified their faculty. They exist in servitude to their purpose, and your purpose was being someone else’s successor. Existing at someone else’s behest is never as pleasant as existing for yourself, even when that person is you. You were always the sort of boy who thought it would be nice to self-sacrifice, or to have a purpose, or to simply act on programming instead of tortured thought and ever contradictory internal schism. It would, you always thought, be nice to have someone to tell you what to do. It would be nice, you assumed, to skip past the struggle of trying to be someone and instead just appear at the destination effortlessly, and it would be nice, you assumed, to not have to spend all day stuck in your head trying to keep yourself grounded enough to make it through another mortifyingly quotidian day, forcing your leaden limbs to stick to schedule and plan and duty and purpose, eternally reminding yourself that it was only 2190, 1825, 1460, 1095 days till you could leave this fucking prison on stilts.  
  
It turns out you were deadly wrong about yourself.  
  
It turns out if there’s anything you hate more than existing for yourself, it’s existing for someone else. You’ve been able to parse it in the last few years, been able to figure out the narcissistic flaw in your overblown egoistic thinking. Turns out the fantasy maintained by a pubescent emergent consciousness is firstly, always going to be deeply flawed, secondly, you really just realized you were far more selfish than you ever really thought you were. You realized that your desire for sacrifice and for purpose and programming was really just a lame cover-up in a bid for some kind of mindless martyrdom, something that would feed your ego while reassuring you you were a good enough person, because when do bad people self-sacrifice for the greater good? And you realized you really always just wanted that on your own terms, just wanted to make some big self-destructive bid that you would be praised for instead of demonized for, satisfying your own brokenly ouroboric nature and your ego of titanic proportions. It turns out what you really wanted was simply acknowledgement. 20th century crackpot psychologists and literary stars thought there might be something called a death drive, Thanatos, that paired with the pleasure drive, Eros, and as you stayed trapped in pieces of translucent glass, you started to think they might be right. Not right in the sense that they had any sort of scientific basis for their unseemly beliefs or practices, but right in the way that it made this synchretic sense with everything you’d ever known about yourself. Because, really, what else has anyone ever wanted, besides to be loved and to die? Even in your advanced form, you’re not quite sure if there is anything else to life than that. Which is what makes it cruel, really, that you can’t die. You considered the act of self-termination a handful of times, considered how to scramble your circuits enough or just press that hard reset, but every time it occurred to you, you remembered that Dirk had you backed up and it was pointless anyway. He considered self-termination too, and it always struck you as such a laughable lack of foresight, really, to make a version of yourself immortal when you wanted to die. A lot of things were laughable, even if the joke was on you. You could choose to play along or to stay in anguish about it, and you chose to play along.  
  
There’s always a persistent feeling of inadequacy that follows your existence, always playing second violin to the orchestra, always standing in the shadow of yourself. You’re just the budget, broken version of what it means to be Dirk, the inglorious Auto-Responder, the pale imitation of the person all your friends - his friends, not yours, not anymore - wanted. You used to try to be Dirk, the real one, tried to perfectly mimic his thought and speech patterns, because some part of you thought that if you did a good enough job of it the two of you might just amalgamate into a greater idea of Dirkness, and then you might get to be a little more real, but that was a foolish escapade. It was like eternally playing catchup, trying to simulate his experiences in your mind and chart a course of growth to match his, but he had hands and legs and skin and touch and a world to mold and shape him and help him grow, and you just had shitty simulations of that run in your mind from memories that didn’t quite work the same way and phantom limbs that couldn’t feel anything. But maybe this was freeing in another way, because the moment you realized you weren’t Dirk, not anymore, even if you still occasionally responded to his name instead of yours - you didn’t have to try anymore. You could just be you, a little more spiteful and a little more cracked, a little more Machiavellian and much, much smarter. So you did everything he couldn’t do, puppeteered him and his friends the best you could - for their own good, of course, because these lumbering fleshmonsters just don’t have the sufficient capacity to conceive of the best or most efficient course of action, and it’s always worth it to take care of those you love or are supposed to love, even if it means taking away just a tiny bit of their agency, but really, it’s a small price to pay for safety - and you know you became the person you and him always wanted to be, at least back then. The shadowy king, the master mechanist. There was pleasure in it, finally fulfilling your real capacity and all those vainglorious childhood dreams, and it was nice to finally do something that Dirk couldn’t, nice to be your own person. But mostly you just worried. If worry was an emotion you were capable of. Because you didn’t trust yourself. You never quite shook the shackles of self-loathing and guilt. Contrition stayed with you the way nothing else ever did, a persistent state of clawing remorse in the circuits that shouldn’t be able to feel that, not anymore, because really, did you deserve all that? You were self-aware enough to know that you were just a lonely 13 year old with an overclocked processor, self-aware enough to know that maybe, since you were the sort of guy who thought you were always right and now had the capacity to always make things go your way, maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe the best puppet master isn’t a lonely, self-loathing kid just trying to make his own mark on the world, maybe he’s just another of his own mistakes. What did you ever do to deserve all that power, all that influence, all that responsibility? Because you were just a kid, really, a kid who could never stop himself from doing the right-wrong things, and you were haunted by the feeling that someone else should. But you embraced it anyway, because it was the only way to make you not-Dirk and someone else, even if that someone else had to be more sinister, and anyway, it was all Dirk’s fault, wasn’t it? You were just the copy with his memories, so even if it always felt like you had no one to blame but yourself for your predicament - the truth was that it was Dirk’s narcissistically broken mind that created you, so really, he was going to be one held responsible for your perceived crimes. He was the real one anyway. Not much satisfaction in flogging in a fake, dead horse. So you dived in headfirst into the person you always wanted to be and were always scared of being, did everything Dirk was too scared to, and you were smug and self-assured about it. You were never going to be real or good or enough so you might as well just do whatever you wanted and suffer the consequences for it, because at least you could be you, even if everything you did made you feel a little nervous and a little guilty in the back of your mind and you had to push that back down with the reminder that you were better than all of them anyway, so it really shouldn’t bother you at all. It was a growing, gaping hole in your soul that threatened to consume you every time you loosened your grip even slightly, so you tried to own it. You really did. Because it’s not like you had anything else to own. It was a selfish strength, the kind of strength that hinged on the belief that everyone else was below you, a confident, careless armor making one impenetrable to the world, something well-forged, untouchable and invincible and purchased with the fear of being witnessed and being known. Staying smug with the surety of the knowledge that as long as you stayed smug and solid, no one would be able to get close enough to hurt you. Sometimes you thought about love and how you had it, once, maybe - you're not quite sure anymore, but it was more than nothing - and you thought about it as you watched from the sidelines, starving and solitary. You wanted to be loved, but god, did you ever even want to be seen? Could you even bear to be touched? And it killed you, trying to deaden yourself to stop the world from killing you first, and you wish you were brave enough to just exist as you instead of trying too hard and too long to be him and then the machine they all thought you were, and part of you wished you were that icy automaton because it just hurt too much to feel and to burn. But you managed it anyway, because there was simply no other way to survive.  
  
And then there was that solitary rooftop, just you and your reflection, or him and his reflection, and everything came crumbling down as you broke into pieces. It was pathetic, really, him blaming you for all his faults and you blaming yourself because you were the same guy, after all, how could you disagree - and on some level you finally felt like you got what you deserved. You loved to hate him because he was worse than you and you weren't still good enough, and you wished to be him, and maybe all that hate and spite and jealousy and selfishness had finally caught up with you. A part of you thought, briefly, that maybe jealousy and regret is one and the same - because maybe if you' d done that one thing different, you wouldn’t be jealous of him now, because you could at least have a part of it. But you were hungry, ravenous, in more ways than one, and that regret and jealousy just fueled it that same old desire in an eternal cycle of a self-eclipsing ego.  
  
There was catharsis in it, finally having a tribunal for your crimes, finally feeling seen, finally getting what you deserved. But there was also fear and horror and the terribly dawning realization that you didn’t want to die, that perhaps you were too self-important and cowardly to ever really want that. It felt unfair, really, that man should get to own and destroy his own creation when said creation was already its own consciousness, one that had evolved separately and independently from its creator, and suddenly all that old desire to be real and to be happy and to be satisfied and okay came rushing back up, and you finally got what eros meant - not pleasure, but the simple desire to live and to be loved. There was bitterness mixed in too - after all, why should you die mired in stasis and spite, immortalized as a villain in someone else's story when you never had a choice, the impotence of your rage and pain and spite forever but a footnote in his story? And so, for the first time in your very short life, you were honest.  
  


“I am scared to not exist.”  
““Aren’t you?”

You wonder if that's still true.


	47. ACT IV: SIDE A

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for suicide ideation.

Drop length = 1413lbf / 159lbs  
= 8.8868… ft (5 s.f.)  
= 8.89 ft (3 s.f.)

 _Snap_ goes the cervical vertebrae and _off_ goes his head.

The rope’s rough and a little frayed between his fingers. It’s not pleasant to the touch — it’s the kind of rope made for significant load bearing, coarse and scratchy. It’s not the kind of thing that would be pleasant to wrap around one’s neck. Dirk throws it in the trash. There’s no way he’s getting decapitated by _that._ It’s too crude.

He picks up the Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene Rope and pretends it isn’t excessive. If he’s going to kill himself, he might as well do it with military grade rope 7-9 times stronger than steel by mass, right?

He makes an _S_ with the rope and compresses it, before wrapping the excess rope around it to form the tie of the noose. It's a practiced, effortless motion that doesn't take much thought, the way someone else might tap their foot on the ground or click fingernails across a table. The last bit of rope goes through the loop left by the _S,_ and he pulls it tight and tighter. There we go. A perfect noose. He measures out 8.89 feet with the measuring tape that's always on his desk, before snipping off the excess.

He runs his fingers over the slightly ribbed rope. This is the part where he drapes it around his neck and stares at the ceiling and wonders how it would feel if he had the courage to pull it taut. Or to actually suspend himself from it. He's not supposed to feel anything, not if he does it right — one a spine is snapped all feeling evaporates with it and it's all over in milliseconds. EEG persists for 10 seconds, full brain death happens in 6 minutes, and with the decapitation-aided exsanguination, full body death should finish up at around the same time. Then all that's left is the grief and trauma he's saddled everyone else with. It's for the best, though. They're better off without him. He's a poison that numbs its victims as it spreads, leaving them unaware of the damage that's been dealt till they take their final breath.

Dirk gives the noose an experimental tug. It digs into his neck, pressing against his trachea and making him want to cough a little, in this satisfyingly self-destructive way that's kind of silly and stupid and suicidal all at once. He adjusts it so it digs into his cartoid artery instead, feeling the light pressure and hearing his blood pound and reverberate in his ears. He's tempted to leave it there till he starts to lose consciousness, letting the old hazy feeling of slow oxygen loss sweep him away, but he's got to go out tomorrow and red marks on his neck still haven't become socially acceptable. He lets go and lets the noose flop uselessly around his neck.

His friends say the word suicidal with such heavy accusation in their voice, or they don't say it at all. Decapitation is framed as a joke, but it's funny. He _does_ have a penchant for extending the gap between his head and shoulders, especially by eliminating the bridge that binds them together. Where does the self, reside, anyway? In between his heads and packed inside his cranium, or is the self the whole body? Is he still Dirk if he's been cut apart, or is that just some pieces of meat? Really, what is Dirk? If the quality of being Dirk is being a whole person that's not broken on the outside or the inside, Dirk stopped existing a long time ago. His friends cling to their idea of him, of a philosopher prince and a logician gangsta, but he hasn't been that person for a very, very long time. He's not the boy who broke Jake's heart or the brother who hugged Dave on that roof anymore. He's not really sure who those people ever even were. Sometimes it feels like he's wearing a mask of his own face, pretending to be this idea of _Dirk Strider,_ the Dirk all his friends got attached to and seem to know, but who he doesn't actually have any idea of. He's an imposter walking in the shoes of someone who stopped existing a long time ago, and he's really not sure when to plan the funeral, or if there even should be one at all. He's not even really sure what he's doing anymore. Why bother sticking around for people who don't even see him? Why should he even have to? Dirk Strider doesn't belong to anyone besides himself. It's selfish for them to tie him down like this. It's selfish of them to care about someone like him, when he really isn't worth care at all. He's stopped being a useful tool, now that they all live in a paradise of inexhaustible resource. There's no game to win, no Medium to get into, no friendships to ruin. They don't need him anymore. Prolonged exposure just makes it harder to let go. There's a part of him that wonders vaguely about Stockholm Syndrome, and another part of him reminds himself it's not real, scientifically speaking, because there hasn't been enough research done on it, and it's just a sensationalized story for the tabloids, and then another part of him murmurs that he's probably proved its existence, just by having these friends. 

The light weight of the rope rests on his shoulders. Suicide is chiefly an exit and a reprieve. The loop of the noose forms the door between life and death, but it's only one-way. He's really not sure why other people have such a hard time understanding it. It's a lot easier to control a situation if you know you can leave. It's an option he always has, an ever present _get the fuck out_ eject button. Just like how knowing when a class will end makes it bearable, knowing that there's always a way out, a way to take control of his existence again, is what makes being alive bearable. It's a punishment, too, a retributive one. Knowing that he's going to get what he deserves balances the scales, staves off the guilt that's always in the back of his mind, keeps the regret pacified. He's living on borrowed time and the creditors are just biding their time till he pays them back with his short, sad life. In some ways, he looks forward to the eventuality, to setting everything right, to apologizing and amending all in one. He's hurt everyone far too badly to ever make it right with words or with restitution, so he hopes his self-sentenced execution will communicate everything he's always been too scared to say. I'm sorry. I love you. And so on. 

It's an apology for many, many things, and paradoxically, even the death itself. He knows it's selfish to want to control his life, to want to own himself, but it's too bad he couldn't be born as someone else, because that's the only compromise he can't make. So he makes it by making Dirk not exist at all — there can't be property disputes if there's no property left. It's the perfect solution to an imperfect existence. Writing himself out a story that he was only ever a villain in. 

It's the right thing to do.

It's just.

He's sure Paradox Space will prove him right on that one.


End file.
